During my school visits, I really enjoy the feedback I get from them much more than anything I might tell say to them.

I find that one of the most important things, as a writer, is to just show up - to just stay in the chair and fight through the difficult patches. As long as you're at the desk, and you're willing to fight it out, eventually the right words will come.

I really like visiting schools, but what I tell students isn't anywhere near as interesting to me as what they tell me.

I've written about illegal immigrants in the United States; I spent a year following migrant farm workers as they were harvesting. I've written about our criminal justice system, and how it treats the victims of crime. I've been working for years now on a book about prisons in America, and I've been going into prisons and traveling around the country and seeing what's going on.

Different people, in good faith, can look at the same fact and interpret it differently. But thats where an interesting conversation begins.

I'd been eating fast food all my life without thinking about it. And the more I learned about the subject, the more intrigued I became.

The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000…. Now our food is coming from enormous assembly lines where the animals and the workers are being abused, and the food has become much more dangerous in ways that are deliberately hidden from us. This isn’t just about what we’re eating. It’s about what we’re allowed to say. What we’re allowed to know.