Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.

A person who is tired of London is not necessarily tired of life; it might be that he just can’t find a parking place.

When I'm writing, I like to travel alone. If you really want to find out about a place, you need to be as free as possible to be spontaneous. You also need to be lonely, because loneliness is a great teacher, too.

The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.