My greatest inspiration is memory.

The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.

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.

No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.

Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.

Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.