i live on my books. on my writings, i live on my royalties: the percentage an author recieves on each sold copy. and i am proud of it. i am so even though such percentage is small or i should say irrelevant.
But here’s what I’ve learned in this war in this country in this city: to love the miracle of having been born.
I always introduce myself as an encyclopedia of defects which I do not deny. Why should I? It took me a whole life to build myself as I am.
You wear yourself out in the pursuit of wealth or love or freedom you do everything to gain some right and once it’s gained you take no pleasure in it.
With our progress we have destroyed our only weapon against tedium: that rare weakness we call imagination.
War is something Arafat sends others to do for him. That is, the poor souls who believe in him. This pompous incompetent caused the failure of the Camp David negotiations, Clinton’s mediation.
What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It’s their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.
Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.
I have reached the conclusion that those who have physical courage also have moral courage. Physical courage is a great test.
It is the mainspring of life, courage. And courage has many faces.
When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life – trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die.