Loneliness in travel directs you and tells you about yourself. You don't become lonely unless you're alone.

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.

People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.

You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.

Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.