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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.

If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.

If you live in the same small place long enough, something you don't like is bound to happen.

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.

People say you can't teach writing, but I think that's nonsense.

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.

What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative.

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living.

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 do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.

I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great.

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

I really don't have a lot in common with the people who attend the Comic Con. It's like assuming that all people who write prose are the same.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.