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

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.

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.

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.

I met a lot of the senior Taliban, and I asked them precisely [about Mullah Omar]. The most common answer was he is humble. And that was very true.

I may have aimed too high sometimes, asked too much of myself and demanded too little from those around me.

I joined another circle and the leader gave us a little leaflet in very small print, asking us to read it carefully and then come prepared to ask questions.

I asked them to sit down since I’d come to walk around. I didn’t want them doing me favours.

She helped me wake up to the fact that I had a source of creativity that was my true creative nature and when I embraced it and asked for this presence in my life.

Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.

When I was creative director [at Estée Lauder], I was always being asked about my beauty must-haves. From there I had this fun idea to create a line of what was in my makeup bag. But I also love accessories, and people associate me with home, family, and beauty.

As a girl, my favorite toy was my dollhouse; if I could still play with it now, I would! I used to love a well-arranged room: the furniture, the fabric, the lighting.