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.

Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't.

An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.

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

I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.

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.

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