Popularity: 0
Vote:   | Andover was like a monastery back then. We worked all the time. The hazing was ferocious-I still hate to think about it. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | At the time I began writing the book about Northampton, I had recently been in Haiti to do a story for the New Yorker. I don't think I would previously have been able to imagine a place as dreadful as Haiti, and when I came back I couldn't help but think about the advantages we have in this place. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Continuity is one of the things I like about New England. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I always want to write something better than the last book. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I can look into parts of the world I don't understand and don't know about, and that's pretty wonderful. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I can't invent stuff, but the techniques fiction writers use to create character and suspense can also be used when writing non-fiction. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I grew up in Long Island, a place that vanished in front of my eyes. I grew up there in the '50s, in the great building boom. It was pretty distressing-you go away and come home and find a whole town gone, a cloverleaf in its place. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I have many thoughts about the view from Mt. Holyoke. It hasn't really changed very much, for one thing. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I like particular people, particular places. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I make an index of my notes and then get to the writing as soon as I can. I do a rough draft, and then I rewrite and rewrite. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I never planned on doing a book about Paul Farmer or his organization. I met him in Haiti when I was on a magazine assignment. It's almost like his story sort of fell in my lap. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows-it's usually hard to read. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I think there's a certain level of decency and honor. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I wanted some way to invite readers in, to set the stage for the book - and I tried many different things. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I wanted to stay with my friends on Long Island, but I finally agreed to take a look at Andover. I remember being impressed by the school's extraordinary facilities. I thought about it long and hard and decided to give it a try. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I went to Iowa to learn how to write fiction, but when I got there I couldn't come up with any good ideas for fiction. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I would read and write all night long and, as a result, wound up cutting a lot of my other classes. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I'm a little suspicious of the great, overarching view. It always leaves something out. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I'm sickened by strip malls, gated communities, decaying, dying old downtowns. We've lost that sense of ancestry in a place, longevity. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If you live in the same small place long enough, something you don't like is bound to happen. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | In a very basic way, a prominent landmark such as Mt. Holyoke tells you where you are. They let you know that you're not the first person in a place. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It's important to hang around with people for a while, let people know what they're getting into. I try to make people have their eyes as open as they can be. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Memory is so much a part of imagination, so plastic, so wonderfully plastic. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | New Journalism was such the rage with authors like Tom Wolfe and John McPhee. All I kept hearing was that non-fiction was so much more interesting than the novels being written at that time. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Northampton has layers and layers. I saw a whole side of it I didn't know, hadn't imagined had existed. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | One of the things I wanted you to feel in this book, when you were with each of the characters, you'd really be with the person, engaged, wondering what would happen and why. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Painting the landscape was, in a sense, another means of exerting control, of imposing order on the disorderly. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | People say you can't teach writing, but I think that's nonsense. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Returning to Northampton, I thought: here's a town that seems to be working pretty well, and I wonder why. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Right now I'm really researching for a good non-fiction story... I doubt that I'll ever find a subject like Paul Farmer ever again. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Sports were crucial. Looking forward to those games could get you through the week. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Suddenly the idea of being a writer seemed much more romantic-and a great way to impress girls. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The subject of this book, Paul Farmer, came along at a time in my life when I was feeling more and more cynical about such global problems as AIDS. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The underside of a town as nice as Northampton can still be pretty gritty. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The view from the summit of Mt. Holyoke has been one of the most famous landscapes in America. And yet, all these things are going on underneath. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The world doesn't make much sense to me generally. I don't feel like I'm good at that. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | We shouldn't forget how terrifying untamed landscape was to early settlers. From their perspective, mankind was put here in the New World to conquer the wilderness. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | What I was trying to suggest... was the intrigue that is always hidden in a scene, what a scene doesn't fully show. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | When I select a topic, it's usually a commitment of two to three years of my life. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | You don't get far with people by judging them, and one of the nice things of my profession is I don't have to. It makes things a lot more fun, more interesting. |