I'd like to end the book a lot of ways. Except I don't have any answers. Use your common sense. Be nice. This is the best I can do. All the trouble in the world is human trouble. Well, that's not true. But when cancer cells run amok and burst out of the prostate and take over the liver and lymph glands and end up killing everything in the body including themselves, they certainly are acting like some humans we know.

Italy is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has told the Italians.

If we want the whole world to be rich, we need to start loving wealth. In the difference between poverty and plenty, the problem is the pverty, not the difference. Wealth is good.

Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.

Finally, one night we were smoking pot [with Michael O'Donoghue] and talking about the people that are invariably in high school, whether you go to prep school or public school or ghetto school or rich suburban school. And actually, it spun off from a Kurt Vonnegut quote.

Never strike anyone so old, small or weak that verbal abuse would have sufficed.

I covered the Lebanese civil war. I could see a place that had once been prosperous and now was impoverished. I'm not seeing that in America.