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" Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with. "

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" Africa is really a place for the wealthy traveler. It's got some nice hotels, but they're very expensive hotels. It doesn't really cater to the backpacker or to the overland traveler. "

" People who don't read books a lot are threatened by books. "

" Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind. "

" The more you write, the more you're capable of writing. "

" Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent. "

" Nyasaland was the perfect country for a volunteer. It was friendly and destitute; it was small and out-of-the-way. It had all of Africa's problems - poverty, ignorance, disease. "

" When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books. "

" Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me. "

" I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose. "

" If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think. "

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

" I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction. "

" I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble. "

" Travel is glamorous only in retrospect. "

" I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees. "

" Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places. "

" I should start by saying that traveling in the States is a bit like traveling in Asia. You need it, it helps to have an introduction - that there is a certain network. "

" The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business, but it's the only thing they've been allowed to do. "

" Travel magazines are just one cupcake after another. They're not about travel. The travel magazine is, in fact, about the opposite of travel. It's about having a nice time on a honeymoon, or whatever. "

" I feel as if my mission is to write, to see, to observe, and I feel lazy if I'm not reaching conclusions. I feel stupid. I feel as if I'm wasting my time. "

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

" I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader. "

" My greatest inspiration is memory. "

" There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go. "

" I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write. "

" Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals. "

" You need to be on your own so that you can meet people as you are, and as they are. "

" I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't want people to ask me questions about it. "

" A place that doesn't welcome tourists, that's really difficult and off the map, is a place I want to see. "

" 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. "