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

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.

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.

Believe me, you have to have a certain confidence in your powers of descretion to let a dentist loose with a drill in your mouth less than an hour after you’ve…um…entertained his wife.

A good fragrance should have a certain personality that makes people identify the scent with you.

Every faction conditions its members to think and act a certain way. And most people do it. For most people, it’s not hard to learn, to find a pattern of thought that works and stay that way. But our minds move in a dozen different directions.

Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points; the higher the rank the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance.

Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil, and Augustus.

When you decide to follow a certain path, you should follow it to the end and not be diverted from it for personal reasons.

It is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives certain plays their feeling of depth and significance.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.