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

You may not know it but I'm no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in.

I never stay with people and I never look people up when I travel. I depend more on just chance meetings. The advantage is that people don't know who I am. I meet people casually and they're not doing me a big favor because I'm going to write something.

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

The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life - the homebound writer's irritants. But also being kept waiting is the human conditon.

The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.