You can't want to be a writer. You have to be one.

Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.

No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.

The traveler's boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience - shocking though it may seem at the time - is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.

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.

My greatest inspiration is memory.

Reading liberates you. You could know about the world through reading.