I never planned on doing a book about Paul Farmer or his organization. I met him in Haiti when I was on a magazine assignment. It's almost like his story sort of fell in my lap.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

Mismatches destroy us all, even the most tender ones, and most never have the courage to break someone else's heart to follow their own.

Peace can be fragile and peace can be ugly and peace can be wrong. Peace built on lies is no peace at all.

Where military service begins, logic ends.

I think about food literally all day every day. It's a thing.

Sleep helps you win at life.

I'm a fan of some of the hyphy stuff. Hyphy has been going on a lot longer than the press has been recognizing it.

A Lyons skin is never cheape.

Nor has he lived in vain, who from his cradle to his grave has passed his life in seclusion.

Me. A bad boy. For eating boiled peanuts in the graveyard. Go figure.

The cyclone derives its powers from a calm center. So does a person.