I always think it's a good policy to like the people who like you.

The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you’re a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence.

“This is hurting me a lot more than it’s hurting you,” he said. It was his standard line, but I knew that this time he was right. Worse than the boil was the stuff that came out of it. What got to me, and got to him even worse, was the stench, which was unbearable, and unlike anything I had come across before. It was, I thought, what evil must smell like - not an evil person but the wicked ideas that have made him that way. How could a person continue to live with something so rotten inside? And so much of it!

Perhaps the little Negro girl was holding a concealed razor blade. Maybe she was one of the troublemakers out for a fresh white scalp.

Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein's monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower. He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, still, you couldn't look at him the same way again.

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

I don't really do very well when I'm sent somewhere. A lot of magazines want to send you somewhere to do something. They want you to stow away on a ship, or something like that.