Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.
The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
They say that if the Swiss had designed these mountains they'd be rather flatter.
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.