Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.

To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.

I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one.

It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.

America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn't for me.

I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.