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

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.

Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.

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 can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.