“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 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.

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’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.

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium.

Everyone needs some time to unwind. There are even coloring book clubs popping up in every state now, so it’s not such an isolating experience.

It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Even when I went to the playground, I never picked the best players.

And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

I always feel better after I post a cover. Even if it’s doing the little 15 second covers.

The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.

See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.