Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.

There's a lot of sensuality that I associate with travel. And that's romance.

I never stay with people and I never look people up when I travel. I depend more on just chance meetings. The advantage is that people don't know who I am. I meet people casually and they're not doing me a big favor because I'm going to write something.

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

You can't save the rhinos and you can't preserve a culture. I'm very pessimistic. Once it's gone, it's over.

It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory.

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.