“Here you can shoot the bad guys,' a mercenary says in Baghdad. 'In America we give them corporate bonuses.”

“Why give me this life and then give me this disease? Why give me joy and beauty of you and Charlie and then snatch it away? It’s like showing someone a glimpse of what life could be like and in the next breath telling them that it can never happen”

“Don’t say anything unless you can improve on the silence.”

“Friendship is a difficult thing to define. Oscar here is my oldest friend. How would you define friendship, Oscar?"Oscar grunts slightly, as though the answer is obvious."Friendship is about choice and chemistry. It cannot be defined.""But surely there's something more to it than that.""It is a willingness to overlook faults and to accept them. I would let a friend hurt me without striking back," he says, smiling. "But only once."De Souza laughs. "Bravo, Oscar, I can always rely on you to distill an argument down to its purest form. What do you think, Dayel?"The Indian rocks his head from side to side, proud that he has been asked to speak next."Friendship is different for each person and it changes throughout our lives. At age six it is about holding hands with your best friend. At sixteen it is about the adventure ahead. At sixty it is about reminiscing." He holds up a finger. "You cannot define it with any one word, although honesty is perhaps the closest word-""No, not honesty," Farhad interrupts. "On the contrary, we often have to protect our friends from what we truly think. It is like an unspoken agreement. We ignore each other's faults and keep our confidences. Friendship isn't about being honest. The truth is too sharp a weapon to wield around someone we trust and respect. Friendship is about self-awareness. We see ourselves through the eyes of our friends. They are like a mirror that allows us to judge how we are traveling."De Souza clears his throat now. I wonder if he is aware of the awe that he inspires in others. I suspect he is too intelligent and too human to do otherwise."Friendship cannot be defined," he says sternly. "The moment we begin to give reasons for being friends with someone we begin to undermine the magic of the relationship. Nobody wants to know that they are loved for their money or their generosity or their beauty or their wit. Choose one motive and it allows a person to say, 'is that the only reason?'"The others laugh. De Souza joins in with them. This is a performance.He continues: "Trying to explain why we form particular friendships is like trying to tell someone why we like a certain kind of music or a particular food. We just do.”

“Fleetingly, unnervingly, I understand what he's saying but cannot accept a world that is so brutally black and white. Murder, rape and torture are the apparatus of terrorists, not of civilized societies. If we become like them, what hope do we have?”

“You know its going to be a bad day when you are having a prostate examination and you feel both of your doctor's hands on your shoulders!”

“It's strange, talking about love. I used to hate the word.Hate is too strong. I was sick of reading about it in books, hearing it in songs, watching it in films. It seemed such a huge burden to place on another person - to love them; to give them something so unbelievably fragile and expect them not to break it or lose it or leave it behind on the No.96 bus.”