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.

I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.

You must not judge people by their country. In South America, it is always wise to judge people by their altitude.

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.

The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

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.

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.