Go to a place and just send out emails. That's my entire life. I go to countries and I ask, "Who would I know who lives here?" Not even do I know, but who exists and is on the planet.

Feminism now seems to be defined as success is defined: as being as good at capitalism as men are. I feel very estranged from it.

I understand maybe some people are more impressionable than my hard, cynical self, but maybe they need to figure out how to be less of that.

I was twenty-one when I was hired by Planned Parenthood. It was my first work experience outside of either temping or working for my father at his store.

Once you leave, you're no longer of that country, but you are never actually of the country that you go to, and if you go back, you're not anywhere. You never belong to anything.

American culture never necessarily made sense to me, but they should warn you: leaving comes with a huge sense of alienation that never goes away.

Talk to people who know more than you. I feel like we're in this stupid sea of opinion, like "My opinion is valid because it's mine and I have it."

You don't have to go to New York and you don't have to go to LA or London. Go somewhere cheap. Go somewhere with free art museums and then just go to art museums.

There's this resistance to actually talking to people who are smarter than you about things and I don't know why that is.

I knew my motivations for going to each place and what I was looking for. If I don't do that then I generally don't write about my travels.

I like European and South American literature, but mostly I read nonfiction.

Those that dare not to dream big are cowards, for they fear to expose the already great potentials embedded inside of them.

I love life more than I love death.

I wouldn't like to just do one story or one type of stories all the time.

Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence; it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.

All my dogs have been scamps and thieves and troublemakers and I've adored them all.

Proper prospecting prevents poverty.

Violence isn't always evil. What's evil is the infatuation with violence.

The commerce between India and Africa will be of ideas and services, not of the manufactured goods against raw materials after the fashion of the Western exploiters.

There is never a sickness Jesus cannot heal and never a disease Jesus cannot cure. To God's power, nothing is impossible!

No man is so methodical as a complete idler, and none so scrupulous in measuring out his time as he whose time is worth nothing.