Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.

You can't save the rhinos and you can't preserve a culture. I'm very pessimistic. Once it's gone, it's over.

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

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.

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.

The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace.

The biggest surprise was that a country like Angola, that has so much money, that produces so much oil, would be in such a mess and so difficult to travel in. Something is almost cursed in striking oil. It's like the lottery winner who ends up broke.