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

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.

Loneliness in travel directs you and tells you about yourself. You don't become lonely unless you're alone.

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.

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.

I never stay with people and I never look people up when I travel. I depend more on just chance meetings. The advantage is that people don't know who I am. I meet people casually and they're not doing me a big favor because I'm going to write something.

Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.