The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

My greatest inspiration is memory.

There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.

There are two worlds: the world of the tourist and the world of everyone else. Often they're side by side. But the tourist doesn't actually see how people live.