I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties.

For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.

I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.

Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I've ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare.

There's a lot of sensuality that I associate with travel. And that's romance.

You can't save the rhinos and you can't preserve a culture. I'm very pessimistic. Once it's gone, it's over.

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