When you put on a clown suit and a rubber nose, nobody has any idea what you look like inside.
Raju is not a man. He is a clown, an entertainer. He'll live here. He'll die here. He'll die here. He'll live here, too
Still, he was ready to run — would run in a second or two, when his mental switchboard had dealt with the shock those two shiny yellow eyes had given him. He felt the rough surface of the macadam under his fingers, and the thin sheet of cold water flowing around them. He saw himself getting up and backing away, and that was when a voice — a perfectly reasonable and rather pleasant voice — spoke to him from inside the stormdrain. There was a clown in the stormdrain.
"I think I’ll be a clown when I get grown,” said Dill.
Jem and I stopped in our tracks.
“Yes sir, a clown,” he said. “There ain’t one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I’m gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.”
“You got it backwards, Dill,” said Jem. “Clowns are sad, it’s folks that laugh at them.”
“Well I’m gonna be a new kind of clown. I’m gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks."