It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.

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

Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it.

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.

I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.