Tibet has a very proud people but it's culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It's like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it's gone.

Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life

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

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

Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.

I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.