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

The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster.

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.

Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.

I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.

I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.