I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust them.

I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.

It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.

I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences.

When I pick a story, I'm very much aware of the larger issues that it's illuminating. But one of the things that I, as a writer, feel strongly about is that nobody is representative. That's just narrative nonsense. People may be part of a larger story or structure or institution, but they're still people. Making them representative loses sight of that. Which is why a lot of writing about low-income people makes them into saints, perfect in their suffering.

We often have an exaggerated sense of what nonprofits and governments are doing to help the poor, but the really inspiring thing is how much the poor are doing to help themselves.

.. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.