I’d tell them, “If you believe in something, go for it, but know that when you go for it there’s a price to be paid. Be ready to pay that price and you can contribute to the welfare of society, and society will acknowledge you and respect you for it. And don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid.”

I would advise them to aim high. To set their sights at a pretty tough target and don’t be too worried if you’re not successful at first. Just keep persisting and keep improving your standards, getting better and better and ultimately, you’ve got a pretty fair chance at achieving your desired goal. ... But, I do think that virtually everybody that’s born has the ability to be very competent at doing something. I think that, in itself, is worthy of aiming towards, just to be competent at doing anything you particularly wish to do.

Invent your own game and that way you can always be a winner.

As a writer, the only thing that you can guarantee yourself pleasure and challenge from is inside your own writing process.

One of the biggest lessons of my life, Krista, has been that we can’t separate the world into monsters and angels and that there’s nothing like loving people and knowing friends who played different roles in the genocide, including being perpetrators, that makes you have to confront that most raw element of what it means to be human. And the only conclusion I could make was that there are monsters and angels in each of us and that those monsters really are our broken parts — they’re our insecurities; they’re our fears; they’re our shames — and that in times of insecurity, it becomes really easy for demagogues to prey on those broken parts and sometimes make us do terrible things to each other.

It is the hardest thing, and inside of it is another secret — we don’t talk about it enough — which is, for anyone who is caretaking someone who’s been sick or who has lost someone, for anyone who’s accompanying someone in a real way, there are times when that love takes every ounce of courage and perseverance that you have in your body, and those are also the times when you like yourself the best.

That human beings are selfish. I don’t believe it. We have angels and monsters inside each of us. What we need to do better as a society is create systems and opportunities to bring out our most generous.

My ability to connect with people. I think I can see people and they feel it.

On the one hand, we have people that say the aid system is so broken we need to throw it out. And on the other we have people who say the problem is that we need more aid. ... Both sides are right. And the problem is that neither side is listening to the other. Even more problematic, they're not listening to poor people themselves.

I think I did always want to change the world from the time I was six. And I guess that was part of both the positive and the pressure.