... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

In a way, Che Guevara's fate was far worse than Simon Bolivar's. Guevara's collapse was complete: his intentions were forgotten, but his style was taken up by boutique owners (one of the fanciest clothes stores in London is called Che Guevara). There is no faster way of destroying a man or mocking his ideas than making him fashionable. That Che succeeded in influencing dress-designers was part of his tragedy.

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

You can't want to be a writer. You have to be one.