I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.

Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.

The happiest people are the ones with the most community.

Children model the behavior of adults, on whatever scale is available to them. Ours are growing up in a nation whose most important, influential men - from presidents to the coolest film characters - solve problems by killing people. ... We have taught our children in a thousand ways, sometimes with flag-waving and sometimes with a laugh track, that the bad guy deserves to die.

What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.