The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.

People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.

Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.

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 grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.

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