When you travel you realize how small you are. You need to be humble. You can't be a big, brash American. You think you have problems. You leave the States and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you. They have nothing to eat, they have no water, they have no shelter, they have a terrible government. So you realize we complain about the government, we complain about food, whatever it is, and go somewhere else and you think, "Now I realize," you say, "Why people want to come to America."

My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

You may not know it but I'm no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in.

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.