Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.

When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.

People who don't read books a lot are threatened by books.

The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that equals the Yangtze River, that equals the Nile. We have the greatest cities in the world - among the greatest cities in the world. We have a large population. We have challenges. We have an indigenous population.

When you travel you realize how small you are. You need to be humble. You can't be a big, brash American. You think you have problems. You leave the States and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you. They have nothing to eat, they have no water, they have no shelter, they have a terrible government. So you realize we complain about the government, we complain about food, whatever it is, and go somewhere else and you think, "Now I realize," you say, "Why people want to come to America."

travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.