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

Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.

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.

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.

It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.

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