I realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news.

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

You know, one, two, three, four, five years go by and then Marcos gets a little boring.

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.

Talking in one language and talking in another, I think inevitably, produce two different personalities, as far as I've seen in other people. I assume it does the same for me.

An essential part of the magic involves turning everyone into an enemy, to ward off surprises.

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.