I find the public reaction to writing - it's fascinating in this modern age. Of course people are able to interact with me and email me, and I get quite a few I suppose.

I was talking to my publisher in Britain and was told here we are - we are sixty million people and we reckon only four hundred thousand people in Britain really read.

Argentina is really in a different category because they butchered all their Indian or indigenous people in the war of the desert in 1850s. Which sets them aside from their neighbors in a macabre way.

I want people to laugh with me and Paraguay and Newfoundland, but I don't want to laugh at them. I hope in my books at the end of the day you come across with the impression that I really admire both of these places.

There is a very big difference between American and British travel journalism, and that's this whole business of the assisted or freebie trip. In Britain we are unashamed about any travel company paying for you to go and then writing about it. That's the only way we can do it. But I have tried the same in the States, and I can't write for any sizeable American newspaper because they tell you to do it on this basis.

What's fascinating is where they come from in the world. People in Bangladesh, a chap in a fire-base in Tikrit in Iraq. Chap in an Irish pub in Dublin. And lovely to think this literary network - or rather network of readers - is well spread out.

I am always surprised to go into a bar in Boston and three televisions are playing different channels, all at once. We are constantly surprised by this noise and television. It means that's what we are going to get, because we always get everything eventually.