there i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do?

There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

It is never a mistake to say good-bye.

Most things in this world don´t work, aspirin do.

War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.