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

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

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

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler. Nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness.

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.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.