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

Bogotá seemed a cruel towering place, like an eagles' nest now inhabited by vultures and their dying prey.

The biggest surprise was that a country like Angola, that has so much money, that produces so much oil, would be in such a mess and so difficult to travel in. Something is almost cursed in striking oil. It's like the lottery winner who ends up broke.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.

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

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

Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I've ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare.