When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.

Multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world's sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders.

The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom; to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy.

Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishenss or indifference. Woodrew knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not.

Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.