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.

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

I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.

It's not fashionable but I like to spit out of the window of a moving train.

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

The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it.

When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.