I'm a tourist, a glorified tourist. I'm not doing it to have a good time or to lie in the sun.

For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.

travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.

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.

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.

Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.

Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.