You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.

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

What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.

There's a lot of sensuality that I associate with travel. And that's romance.

The traveler's boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience - shocking though it may seem at the time - is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.