Paul Farmer has helped to build amazing health care system in one of the poorest areas of Haiti. He founded Partners in Health, which serves the destitute and the sick in many parts of the world from Haiti to Boston and from Russia to Peru.

The only real nation is humanity

That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.

At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done.

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

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.