Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?

Suddenness," he says. " You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.

We're all entitled to our superstitions.

In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year.

In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.

I grew up in Cyprus and Egypt, these fantastic places I remember fondly.

For me it was a lot harder to come to terms with the death of my grandfather than it was to come to terms with what's happened to the former Yugoslavia.