The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again. I'm completely in awe of this skill, since I happen to be both bilingual and a writer, but nevertheless a lousy translator.

One does, after all, take on many of the givens of a society when one takes on its language.

What I wonder is what would happen in California, say, if all the Mexicans left from one day to the next?

I'm an efficient, good, professional reporter. But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care.

The left is being funded primarily by the drug traffickers who provide this tax money and that's why the guerrillas in Colombia, unlike the guerrillas anywhere else in Latin America, have been able to survive for 40 years because they have a hard, solid source of income.

There is no point to samba if it doesn't make you smile.

Peron had a wise saying. In politics, you can recover from anything except looking like a fool.