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 at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life

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.

In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.

Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't.

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way