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

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.

To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it's a paradox of this sort of parallel life. A safari is an expensive experience and it's adjacent to a place where people are having a very tough time.

The monotony of staying in one place is the best thing for writing a novel. Having regular habits, a kind of security, but especially no big surprises, no shocks.

I am happy being what I am.

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

I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple.