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.

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

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.

Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange.

The only real nation is humanity

And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.

When I select a topic, it's usually a commitment of two to three years of my life