Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.

Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.

It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.

I write my books to challenge my own feelings and theories. Perhaps most surprising was what I learned about rice farming. It was really interesting to think of how different Asian and Western cultures are as a result of the kinds of agricultural practices that our ancestors used for thousands of years. The life of a Chinese peasant in the Middle Ages was so dramatically different from the life of a European peasant - night and day different.

It's as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani.

Part of me thinks that innovation, real innovation in health care delivery, needs to happen from the bottom to the top.

My highest compliment is when someone comes up to me to say, "My 14-year-old daughter, or my 12-year-old son read your book and loved it." I cannot conceive of a greater compliment than that - to write something that as an adult I find satisfying, but also that manages to reach a curious 13- or 14-year-old.