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

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.

When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

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

The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.