I am grateful to Stacy Schiff first of all because she can write a sentence-because she offers us her scholarship with wit, clarity, and grace. Once again, she has done what only the best writers can do: she has made the world new, again.

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

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.

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

I've gotta keep life and computers separate, or else I'm gonna go mad.

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

What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I'm interested in how ordinary people live their lives