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

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

I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.

I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster.

Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.

A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler. Nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness.

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.