That's more about lifestyle [Peter Mayles], living abroad. It's about buying a donkey and house in south France, and that's a slightly different thing. A very popular genre but that's not quite my thing.

I tend to prefer traveling in the Third World countries. Like Ethiopia. Or Eritrea.

I feel better off doing what I know how to do. I feel a strong element of fictional style in travel writing anyway. Some call it creative nonfiction.

There are 60 million of us [britains] crammed into an area the size of a state. So you don't have that feeling of remoteness at all, ever. And that's reflected in the way our media works, and so on.

If you see our best seller list, most of them are books that are given as gifts. They are books you give to flatter somebody.

I have dipped into Ian McEwan and so on. I tend not to stick with one writer. But I dip in here and there.

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.