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.

When I'm writing, I like to travel alone. If you really want to find out about a place, you need to be as free as possible to be spontaneous. You also need to be lonely, because loneliness is a great teacher, too.

"Connected" is the triumphal cry these days. Connection has made people arrogant, impatient, hasty, and presumptuous... I don't doubt that instant communication has been good for business, even for the publishing business, but it has done nothing for literature, and might even have harmed it. In many ways connection has been disastrous. We have confused information (of which there is too much) with ideas (of which there are too few). I found out much more about the world and myself by being unconnected.

Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall.

I don't look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren't there, there would be no economy. So I understand why a tourist economy is necessary.

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.