Of course, the diary helps me as well. 'That wasn't your position on July 7, 1991,' I'll remind Hugh an hour after we've had a fight. I'd have loved to rebut him sooner, but it takes awhile to look these things up.

Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things together before going to bed. The former bishop of Turkey will be coming tonight along with six to eight black men. They might put some candy in your shoes, they might stuff you into a sack and take you to Spain, or they might just pretend to kick you. We don't know for sure, but we want you to be prepared." This was the reward for living in the Netherlands. As a child you get to hear this story, and as an adult you get to turn around and repeat it.

I started typing diary in, I don't know, 1978 or '79, but then the computer changed that a lot. Because with the computer if you were writing and you realized you had three sentences in a row that started with the word "he," you could fix that right up, whereas on a typewriter you'd think, "Well, I'm not going to change the whole page. It's my diary." So that made a difference.

I'm not a reporter but the 'New Yorker' treats everyone like a reporter.

Each one of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, sooner or later something's gonna get you.

And when Hugh would grow progressively Gandhi on me, I'd remind him that these were pests---disease carriers who feasted upon the dead and then came indoors to dance upon our silverware.

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