One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

It's not fashionable but I like to spit out of the window of a moving train.

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.

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

Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.

Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.