Japan has come a long way.

Satellite communications connect television screens in Japan with television cameras in England, and the distance of half a world loses its meaning.

There is a common theme that economic fortunes look brighter in Japan and continental Europe than they do in the U.S., ... Even though higher rates should help the currency, they haven't because most people are seeing that as the Fed's move to slow the economy and reduce growth.

Constant love despite almost impossible anti-clamix towards this place of the rising sun...

Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper.

When I first talked about writing with Saul he insisted on the ability to change, to get a serious grip on what was real in your life, ... He was the 20th century's literary wizard, who fused the intellect and the imagination in glorious and comic language that we'd never heard before.