A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

In a way, Che Guevara's fate was far worse than Simon Bolivar's. Guevara's collapse was complete: his intentions were forgotten, but his style was taken up by boutique owners (one of the fanciest clothes stores in London is called Che Guevara). There is no faster way of destroying a man or mocking his ideas than making him fashionable. That Che succeeded in influencing dress-designers was part of his tragedy.

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.

No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the same qualities that made English people seem stubborn and secretive made them, face to face, reliable and true to their word. I thought: The English do small things well and big things badly.