I still sometimes encounter readers from the South who speak to me of the book's impact on them when it first fell into their hands in an Istanbul shantytown, a Greek port, the slums of Madrid, Damascus or Bombay. In these different places the book had an intimate address. It was no longer a sociological (or even political at the first degree) treatise but, rather, a little book of life stories, a sequence of lived moments — such as one finds in a family photo album. [From the Preface]

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

The clown knows that life is cruel. The ancient jester's motley coloured costume turned his usually melancholy expression in to a joke. The clown is used to loss. Loss is his prologue.

Most people, she said, can't stand the truth. It's too bad but there it is, most people can't stand it.

Accept the unknown. There are no secondary characters. Each one is silhouetted against the sky. All have the same stature. Within a given story some simply occupy more space.

It has always seemed to me that those who are without power, who have to create their own in a makeshifit way, know more about life than those who govern.

One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.