“As admirable as it was to be honest and decisive, enemies could be made stupidly and by accident, and terrible mistakes could test friendships. George Plimpton, as editor of the Paris Review, once turned down a story from his childhood friend Peter Matthiessen, calling it “risible”—something he regretted as long as they lived. A friend of mine from college became outraged after I rejected one of his poems at Rolling Stone. I told him the magazine didn’t run poetry anymore, which it didn’t. He never spoke to me again.”
"Unable to hold back, I’ve sat down to record the story of my first steps on life’s path, when I could actually get by without doing so. There’s one thing I know for sure: I’ll never again sit down to write my autobiography, even if I live to be a hundred."
"A ruddy light pressed brazenly in through the compartment window and divided the space. The man’s bunk was left in shadow, the girl’s in light."
“Knowing where to find the human traffickers was easy. All the Somalis in Addis Ababa knew it, and in recent weeks I had asked the right questions.”