I thought often during my years in the White House of an admonition that we received in our small school in Plains, Georgia, from a beloved teacher, Miss Julia Coleman. She often said: "We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles."

My mother said — and I didn’t realize how well it works — when I’d bring a drawing to her, she said, “I don’t look at the drawing. I looked at the child, and if the child was excited, I got excited.” And then we could discuss it. Because we were bringing something that meant something to me as a child. And so she would join in my lassitude, or my excitement, or my frustration. She wasn’t a psychologist, but she did understand this simple matter. Also, it accomplishes the only thing that has any meaning to a little child. The only thing an adult can give a child is time. That’s all, there isn’t anything else. That’s the only thing they need, really, is time. If you give them time, you’ll have to be understanding of them and give them time.

One of my editors once said to me, “If you get invited to the White House, take your notebook with you,” and he meant it. It’s something one has to always remember because when you stray off the path, you do a disservice to the American public.

Maestro Abreu always said something very, very beautiful. He said, “The culture for poor people cannot be a poor culture.” You know, and he said in the sense that for the poor people, for the people that needs, we have to give the best, the best that we can.

Study broadly. Don’t specialize too early. Read history. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to specialize, but within the limits that you have to take obligatory courses to get a degree, keep your general education as broad as you can, because you never know what doors are going to open to new opportunities — ten, 15, 20 years down the road — because of changes in science and technology.

So we had to take this special exam and I flunked it. Erv Upton passed it, and I was scared. I figured if I failed it, I wouldn’t have any chance of getting in. So I failed it beautifully. ... And so it was the first year of this general college, which gave an Associate of Arts degree after two years, and that was expected to be a terminal course. It turned out it wasn’t.