How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

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

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

I usually write about ordinary people and ordinary things, but Paul Farmer is the least ordinary person I've ever met... He's the leader of a small group of people who hope to cure a sick world, and I hope my book can help in some small way.

I tell beginning readers to read a lot and write a lot. If you want to write a book, find a subject that's really worth the time and effort you'll put in.

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.

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.