“A symbolic flag on the quad or something to show how many people were starving in the world. But once they saw their efforts connected to a person, I did see a change.”

I love factoids. It’s hard for me to keep those out. It just takes realizing that it’s stopping the character.

And be connecting in other countries with other people, did open them up and empower them and their sense of being. Whether it affected their writing, it’s hard to tell.

I do think the job of a writer is to raise questions and nobody likes the questions being asked.

What really resonated with my students, I think, is that most of the writers we worked with were journalists, and when they saw journalists simply raising questions and being put in jail for that, it did freak them out a little bit.

My sense, and I’m sort of guessing, is that the journalists were being classified by the government as common criminals, and the political prisoners were so resistant to being that.

I do think that has a certain subversiveness to it. Even if it’s not on a geopolitical level.

What I did notice with all of them, even the people who professed to be interested in human rights, was that activism was somewhat a concept in their mind

The fact that my students could be in a little college in a little college town on the coast of Rhode Island

Part of it is the decision to keep things where you want to train the spotlight. For me, it’s the personal side. I always ask, How does the person inside the character relate to this?

Often people who already had an interest in human rights work.

If one is writing in a way that is questioning, or even raising questions about how we are supposed to negotiate the world – even if it is about the self, or love, or how human beings relate

I’m really sort of cautious about being too didactic. To me there are writers that can do that, but I think they drown in that after a while.

In many respects most of the books I write deal with well-known people. I think of those books as more about me than about those people.

Always keeping [the other prisoners] as murderers, thieves, that sort of thing, which has a certain irony to it, I guess. It’s a curious thing.

Worrying that banning flag desecration would inhibit free speech reveals a misunderstanding of the flag’s fundamental nature.

Rather, the flag is a symbol of our national unity.

It is the will of the American people that we have a right to protect our flag.

Our flag is not just one of many political points of view.

The American flag represents all of us and all the values we hold sacred.

You can beg them for mercy, wave the white flag of surrender, but the only true elixir for the vitriol they bestow is a measure of hatred dispensed of your own.

Even though we are not sure of the links, Iraq was one of the countries that did not lower its flags in mourning on 9/11.

I don’t want the news to be patriotic. I don’t want to see flags on the lapels of the anchors. I don’t want any of that.