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

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

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.

So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.

He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.

I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.