I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows - it's usually hard to read.

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

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

I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

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.

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.