Barbara Kingsolver

The best research gets your fingers dusty and your shoes dirty, especially because a novel is made of details. I had to know what a place smelled like, what it sounded like. ... There's no substitute for that. I've been steeped in evidence-based truth.
-Barbara Kingsolver

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do, is re-engage people with their own humanity. Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
-Barbara Kingsolver