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.

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.

There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.

Was the crew well? Was I not? I had profited in many ways by the voyage. I had even gained flesh, and actually weighed a pound more than when I sailed from Boston.

Our situation here, without any exaggeration, is beyond description almost; it is such as eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it ever entered into the heart of men to conceive Boston ever to arrive at.

A very considerable body of the German people live in America and propose to fight that Government. Bourke in his great speech last week welcoming the Belgian mission to Boston worked out the President's meaning with care.

At a Boston signing, someone from the audience asked why I was so obsessed with furniture in my books. The question rattled around in my head. I had no idea that I was obsessed with furniture.

My father was the orphaned son of immigrants to the United States from Ireland. My father never knew his parents. His mother died - we're not sure - either at or shortly after his birth, and he and all of his siblings were placed in orphanages in the Boston area.

Boston is the engine of the state's economy.

And it was from Boston that one in every six American families began their journey into the land of the free.

I don't believe a manager ever won a pennant. Casey Stengel won all those pennants with the Yankees. How many did he win with the Boston Braves and Mets?

There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country?

In my freshman year in high school, I went to the only public high school in Boston with a theatre program.

The word survivor suggests someone who has emerged alive from a plane crash or a natural disaster. But the word can also refer to the loved ones of murder victims, and this was the sense in which it was used at a four-day conference in early June at Boston College.

Probably the biggest thing that surprises people is that I am obsessed with hockey. I grew up in the Boston area so I am obsessed with hockey since I was a little kid.

When I go abroad I always sail from Boston because it is such a pleasant place to get away from.

I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

Here's what I see all across this great city - people working together to make Boston a better place to live and to raise children, to grow and pursue dreams.

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.

I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever done for any other medium or occasion.

If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece.

Let's use the energy of this historic year to propel us toward our shared vision of a greater Boston.

I got private lessons in keyboard at Julliard, before New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

And that's the mistake that was made with Steel Pier. Roger was caught between a rock and hard place. It would have cost a couple of million dollars more to take it to Boston or someplace first. So we opened about a month too early.