You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

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.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia

... "You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.

If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.