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

Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.

Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it.

An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.