Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.

Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.

Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life

It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.

You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.

I'm a tourist, a glorified tourist. I'm not doing it to have a good time or to lie in the sun.

The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the same qualities that made English people seem stubborn and secretive made them, face to face, reliable and true to their word. I thought: The English do small things well and big things badly.