What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry.

All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting.

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.

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.

I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.

They say that if the Swiss had designed these mountains they'd be rather flatter.

All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.