I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.

Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.

Reading is also a journey. It's a process of discovery.

Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life

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 glamorous only in retrospect.

Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it.