“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

If it’s illegal to rock and roll, then throw my ass in jail.

In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

You can kill a revolutionary but you can’t kill revolution, you can jail a liberator but you can’t jail liberation.

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution.

Do not help your jailers to pretend that their jail is your natural state of existence.