The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that equals the Yangtze River, that equals the Nile. We have the greatest cities in the world - among the greatest cities in the world. We have a large population. We have challenges. We have an indigenous population.

You can't want to be a writer. You have to be one.

I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.

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."

Is there any point in going across the world to eat something or buy something or watch people squatting among their ruins? Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with distance or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience.

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

The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it.