I was able to not fold and go in a corner because I had my writing as therapy, but also as my tool for struggle.

We live now in a global culture where anything that happens in a place that's 90 minutes from your shores really affects you.

There is something human about the way people react to and identify with suffering. There's a lot more empathy in the world than we perhaps realize.

They say behind mountains are more mountains.

Napoleon had been fighting this army of slaves and free people in Haiti and it depleted his forces. And after the Revolution, when the French were driven out, they stopped and sold this big chunk of North America to the Americans for very little money.

There are many possible interpretations of what it means to create dangerously, and Albert Camus, like the poet Osip Mandelstam, suggests that it is creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience to a directive.

Someone has said that nations have interests, they don't have friends, and you see that over and over in U.S. policy.