I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust him

But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don’t want to live in that world.

...much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.

In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down.

I'm useless when I meet writers I love - I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe.

A great deal of what is presumed to be intractable or inevitable in this world doesn't strike me that way at all.

We often have an exaggerated sense of what nonprofits and governments are doing to help the poor, but the really inspiring thing is how much the poor are doing to help themselves.

One thing that was very clear to me is that the young people in a place like Annawadi aren't tripping on caste the way their parents are. They know their parents have these old views.

I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust them.

.. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.

Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.

And sometimes - to get what you want - you must be prepared to accept the apparently unacceptable.

I don't need somebody behind a desk to tell me what a marketing survey says is funny. I got 3 million miles and 70, 000 tickets sold, telling me that I know how to make people laugh.

It's not a pretty face, I grant you. But underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.

When you have an important story to tell, the words you need seem to come of their own accord.

Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.

If you give me rice, I'll eat today; if you teach me how to grow rice, I'll eat every day.

I like the girls in Ecuador. They are more gentle and trusting, more innocent. They are not as suspicious of strangers as Colombian girls.

Work while your strength and years permit you; crooked age will by-and-by come upon you with silent foot.

What a person does is what he IS, not what he says.