14.
“In November 1989, I was with the West German press corps in Warsaw, and they all tore off to Berlin and said the Berlin Wall was gonna fall. I laughed and stayed put. A few hours later, I watched it all on TV in a shitty Warsaw bar and drank half a bottle of vodka while crying and laughing at the same time. Needless to say, my US newspaper fired me.”
“Buying an apartment in Berlin in 1990. Sure, that price would skyrocket. It didn’t. Left Germany for Austria in 1996. Put the apartment on the market, and it sat empty with no callers for two years. Sold it at 30% less than what I paid for it in 1999. Today, it’s worth four times what I paid.
Way back in 1968, when I was 18, I started university in the US and was told by my English professor I should be a writer. My family told me that it was stupid and that I should go into advertising, which I did for 18 years and hated it. Finally, I started writing what I wanted to at 36. Bernard Malamud wrote in The Natural: ‘Each of us has two lives. There’s the life we learn with and the life we live with after that.'”
