I am happy being what I am.

You may not know it but I'm no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in.

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

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

You can't save the rhinos and you can't preserve a culture. I'm very pessimistic. Once it's gone, it's over.

There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail, knowing that everything you need is on your back. It is a confidence in having left the inessentials behind and of entering a world of natural beauty that has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a dead weight. The person with the fewest possessions is the freest. Thoreau was right.

My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.