When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it..

The only real nation is humanity.

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved..

...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself..

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass..

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 ….

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work..

I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season..

Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of….

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..

... "You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming..

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..

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

I usually write about ordinary people and ordinary things, but Paul Farmer is the least ordinary person I've ever met... He's the leader of a small g….

Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence ….

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..

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translat….

What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I'm interested in how ordinary people live their lives.

I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why..

And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist,….

That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people..