It's not fashionable but I like to spit out of the window of a moving train.

My greatest inspiration is memory.

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

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.