I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.

Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things.

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

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.

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