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" Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing. "

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" There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment. "

" You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend. "

" Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves. "

" I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties. "

" The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming. "

" My greatest inspiration is memory. "

" It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources. "

" 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. "

" My record was so bad that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troublemaker and was accepted as a volunteer only after a great deal of explaining and arguing. "

" Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us. "

" Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace. "

" 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. "

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

" The people I've known who've done great things of that type - you know, building hospitals, running schools - are very humble people. They give their lives to the project. "

" 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. "

" I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don't want to relax. I want to see something. "

" I wanted the Peace Corps to be something very vague and unorganized, and to a large extent it was. It did not run smoothly. The consequence was that we were left alone. "

" 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. "

" When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home. "

" 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. "

" What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one's whole life. "

" 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. "

" The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely. "

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

" Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something. "

" Love doesn't last. "

" People see a hungry face, and they want to feed it; that's a natural response. "

" The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume. "

" When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen. "

" 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. "