Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.

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 must not judge people by their country. In South America, it is always wise to judge people by their altitude.

I am happy being what I am.

Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.