Traveling alone offers the chance to test the limits of what you think you know about yourself.

'Reality' is a notion that journalists take for granted.

It was beguiling to live in a country, Scotland, that didn't look enough like itself to be a location for its own movies... I remember consulting a film book and discovering that Arthur Freed decided to shoot Brigadoon in Hollywood because nowhere in Scotland looked Scottish enough.

Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.

Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.

The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

Interviewing is not a democratic art.