Bits and pieces flung into the universe, sticking in the sky like cotton balls on a jet black velcro surface.

Grey cloth coaxes the lime trees of friends shadowing berries dropped by the grateful earth.

Shine like the day I set cosmic eyes on you, friend, by the light of the sweet squash in my lovely laser broom.

Highest of heights, I climb this mountain and feel one with the rock and grit and solitude echoing back at me.

I bow down in memory of the victims, and I come to tell my Armenian friends that we will never forget the tragedies that your people has endured.

Expats are a self-selecting group of outgoing, confident people - if you're not those things, you probably don't choose this adventure - and the lifestyle is very conducive to making fast, close friends.

My liberal friends love to dismiss Reagan. You know, they'll say something like, 'Oh, didn't he, like, only read one-page memos when he was in the White House?' Well, that's just good managerial practice. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt made people write one-page memos.

Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you're deprived of it.