I find the public reaction to writing - it's fascinating in this modern age. Of course people are able to interact with me and email me, and I get quite a few I suppose.

I'll always love Paraguay. It's this most exotic place configured out of the imagination, the whole country.Paraguay will always be a special place in my heart. I go back a long way. I first arrived as a refugee in 1982 from the Falklands War. So it was a safe haven then, and it has become something exotic since then. I feel like I'd like the dust to settle a little bit before going back.

Lawrence Millman is a favorite writer of mine. He did a travels on the trail of the Vikings.

The United Nations was the thing I wanted to work for. Like the United Nations Commission for Refugees is what I was interested in. And then people said if you do that you'll hit glass ceilings all the time, because you are not Ghanian or Nigerian and that's the way to progress though a multinational organization like that. In any event, they said do five years' legal experience and come back. And after five years I decided to stay where I was. So I am really an accidental lawyer.

I am no apologist for Fidel's [Castro] regime. It is, after all, a totalitarian regime. So I would like to see that change.

My parents probably feel closer to the U.S. They feel America came to our rescue in the war and all that sort of thing. And for their generation the war still goes on. We still save food and little bits get scraped off and boiled out the next day.

One does have to learn to travel with a degree of humility and that reflected in writing and personality.