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

And that is all anyone can do, try to be honest about what he feels, what he's seen or thinks he's seen.

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

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.

It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.

When you travel you realize how small you are. You need to be humble. You can't be a big, brash American. You think you have problems. You leave the States and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you. They have nothing to eat, they have no water, they have no shelter, they have a terrible government. So you realize we complain about the government, we complain about food, whatever it is, and go somewhere else and you think, "Now I realize," you say, "Why people want to come to America."

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