The usual run of children's books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, 'I am a swallow.' Then I looked up and asked, 'How do you spell telephone wires?

I haven't got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other god.

It's an old sailor's idea that every ship has a rope with one end made fast to her bows and the other held by the loved ones at home.

Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the "things" of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. "We give our children guns and computer games," Wendy said. "They gave their children the land."

Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.

Travel doesn't merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind.

If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.