The goofiness of radicals thinking they have to dress in Guatemalan peasant clothes. The poor don't want you to look like them. They want you to dress in a suit and go get them food and water. Comma.

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.

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 know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all

I always want to write something better than the last book.

...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.