All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

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

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.

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

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

I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.

Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.