Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I'm interested in how ordinary people live their lives

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.