Vitali Vitaliev is the Ukranian-born author, poet and journalist whose life has been spent exploring the curious, the unusual and the plain dotty manifestations of human life around the world. In this honest memoir, Vitaliev describes how on many occasions in his life, words have provided him with the means of survival: the words of great writers from Mikhail Bulgakov to George Orwell; the words of writer friends such as Peter Ustinov and Joseph Heller; the words of his mother, of his children. He references his own writing too, with memories of creative assignments all over the globe, recalling the voices of people he as met and the impressions they made on him.