“If they are, they can fill in the details even better than I could, just with their imaginations.”

I’m going to tell kids the way things really were.

The waiting that people do in Turkey to get aboard one of these boats is incredible.

I allow readers to fill in the details as necessary. But I don’t force kids to have to digest something they’re not mature enough or ready for yet.

I don’t know that I would have the courage to come over to a new country where the religion is different, the language is different, where I don’t have any money.

Baseball, more than any other sport, has a magical way of connecting fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren and ancestors back down the line. – From The Brooklyn Nine

Waiting is a huge part of being a refugee. You’re waiting at borders to get across. You’re waiting for transportation.

People will ask me, “How do you approach writing books for young readers differently than for adults?” My answer is always: I don’t change anything about the story itself.

And then when they finally do get aboard, it’s the last place they want to be. It’s harrowing. That is the horrible irony of a refugee’s life.

Your family immigrated to this country – whether they came over on the Mayflower or whether they came over on a raft last year.

You wait and wait for the next step, and when you get to the next step, it’s awful.

What I don’t do – and this is the only thing I do differently in writing for kids – is that I don’t revel in the gory details.

I think kids are incredibly savvy readers.

One of the things I tell about Refugee is that unless you’re Native American or a descendant of slaves.

You don’t want to be doing it. But you have to. You have to keep moving forward.

The thought of starting over like that in the way that many refugee families have to start all over again – that’s an incredible thing to think about.

I think we should give them all the credit in the world. They want to know the truth.

Sometimes when you start losing detail, whether it’s in music or in life, something as small as failing to be polite, you start to lose substance.

I generally leave the details of fiscal programs to the Administration and Congress. That’s really their area of authority and responsibility, and I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to second guess.

[Scott Derrickson] is terrific, really sharp on the details, and he’s not afraid to go to dark places.

Transparency and detail are everything in science.

I don’t know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.

One must be entirely sensitive to the structure of the material that one is handling. One must yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps the handling of the surface or grain, and one must master it as a whole.

I don’t have to figure out why or how or when. God has a plan, and I’m committed to it. That commitment frees me from having to worry about the details.

Every new discovery in science brings with it a host of new problems, just as the invention of the automobile brought with it gas stations, roads, garages, mechanics, and a thousand other subsidiary details.