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" I grew up in the small town of Haywards Heath, south of London. "
Lawrence Osborne
Small
Town
Small Town
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" I think humans are migratory animals. "
Lawrence Osborne
Think
Animals
Humans
" One winter, I went to Erfoud to research trilobites and got to know the quarries, the dealers, and the remote mining villages. They are not easy places to visit, and this was a completely unknown corner of the world economy: children slaving away on desert cliffs to furnish wealthy collectors in San Francisco. "
Lawrence Osborne
Winter
World
Know
" Mongolians are epic drinkers and carousers, and in this respect, they are extremely congenial to my own way of thinking. "
Lawrence Osborne
Way
Own
Thinking
" I read Gide's 'The Immoralist' over and over as a teenager. I was obsessed with it. It's written with such simplicity and dread, and the desert, the shabby colonial world, is brought right into your consciousness without being over-explained. "
Lawrence Osborne
Desert
Right
Simplicity
" I still miss qualities of Khmer life that are hard to quantify: the slow, sensual pace, the hovering presence of the past, the vast skies filled with terrifying and beautiful butts. And, of course, the food. "
Lawrence Osborne
Life
Past
Beautiful
" Asa Briggs was a historian of class history, so he felt obligated to bring in his driver. That's the English class thing that is much weaker now. "
Lawrence Osborne
History
Driver
Class
" Boredom and sexual desire are a potent and explosive combination, and people will certainly risk their lives to exit a grey and boring life. "
Lawrence Osborne
Boredom
Desire
People
" Thailand was never a European colony, so even though the city is very Western on the surface, deep down it's very Asian. It's quite enigmatic, and I like that. I can't get to the bottom of Bangkok, and I never will. "
Lawrence Osborne
City
Like
Never
" I spent a fair amount of time in Communist Poland when I was young - my wife was from there - and I had the impression that boredom was one of the things that was undermining that whole society from the inside. "
Lawrence Osborne
Time
Boredom
Society
" Military history is essential to understanding any history and, moreover, is a terrifying and sobering study in the realities of human nature - for yes, to me, such a thing exists, and history indeed proves it. "
Lawrence Osborne
History
Human Nature
Me
" To me, the contemporary novel suffers from a lack of sense of place - or spirit of place, if you will. It's not important to most writers, I must assume, or they try to research a given background on sabbatical. Not for me. I write about places I've lived long before I ever set pen to paper. "
Lawrence Osborne
Place
Research
Pen
" I don't know where this thing about me being a travel writer comes from. It's nothing to do with me; I hate travel writing. I don't do it - I do it a little bit, but not much. I don't believe in it. I think it's over. The world is so saturated now that you don't need it. "
Lawrence Osborne
Hate
Me
World
" There's a distinct unease about Americans when they are outside the United States. I can't say quite what it is, but they are easily spooked or driven to cynicism - the country is diverse but, paradoxically, extremely insular. "
Lawrence Osborne
Country
Driven
Outside
" Arak means 'sweat' in Arabic, and it is the perfect Mediterranean after-dinner drink, in my opinion. "
Lawrence Osborne
Opinion
Drink
Perfect
" There's something attractive about making people temporarily forget their actual age by taking them out of their normal lives so completely. Doesn't travel, by its very nature, strive to do this? "
Lawrence Osborne
Forget
Age
Nature
" My mother sent me and my sisters to Italy every year for language school, so I spent a lot of my teenage years in Florence and Rome. After university I went to Harvard for a year, dropped out, and then went to Paris, where I ended up staying 10 years. It's different from being American: If you're British, you're expected to live at the far corners. "
Lawrence Osborne
You
American
School
" I have found that whiskey is enjoyed as a refined secret pleasure in many cities - and it appears to be popular in Pakistan, as it is all over the tropical Asian world, Muslim or non-Muslim. "
Lawrence Osborne
Pleasure
Secret
World
" The drinker is a Dionysiac, a dancer who sits still, a mocker. He doesn't need your seriousness or your regard. He just needs a little quiet music and a gentle freedom from priests. "
Lawrence Osborne
Gentle
Quiet
Need
" Muslims do drink, as anyone who has spent a wild weekend with Saudi booze tourists in Bahrain will know. Those Saudi tourists are like teenage girls in Manchester on a Saturday night. But each country and region is different. "
Lawrence Osborne
Know
Night
Saturday
" My favorite whisky bar in the world is in my adopted Bangkok. A refined and secretive Japanese speakeasy among the girly bars of Soi 33, it's called Hailiang. "
Lawrence Osborne
Girly
Bar
Bangkok
" Exams are not very hard. People find them hard because they don't work - it's just a matter of labour. Once you actually start doing it, it's like cracking eggs. You don't need to be smart. As everything is in life, it's about concentration. "
Lawrence Osborne
Life
Smart
People
" The English are very indulgent to episodes of alcoholic insanity. "
Lawrence Osborne
Insanity
Very
English
" More than 700 years ago, the Song Dynasty artist Zheng Sixiao created perhaps the most beautiful image of orchids ever painted, 'Ink Orchid.' And still famous today is a thousand-year-old poem from the Tang Dynasty called 'Orchid and Orange.' "
Lawrence Osborne
Beautiful
Famous
Song
" At the end of the 18th century, a young British explorer named George Bogle became one of the first Westerners to penetrate the mysterious and reclusive realm of Druk Yul, or 'Dragon Land.' "
Lawrence Osborne
Young
Mysterious
Land
" The orchid's association in Chinese culture with such virtues as elegance, good taste, friendship, and fertility goes all the way back to Confucius himself, who was said to have a particular attachment to the flowers. "
Lawrence Osborne
Flowers
Good
Friendship
" Studies in the emerging field of cellular bioenergetics, a branch of biochemistry concerned with how energy flows through living systems, suggest that molecules from orchids might be able to repair decaying mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells, in humans. "
Lawrence Osborne
Cells
Energy
Living
" I've got everything against likable characters. Likable characters are usually completely forgettable, and we don't really care. I think we love villains... precisely because they show us these disturbing complexities that I don't think nice characters do. "
Lawrence Osborne
Us
Think
Nice
" One of the reasons I like living in Bangkok is that, although it's a megacity, it's very saturated with nature - the vast and brooding skies, the sudden storms and rains, the vegetation and even the animals that abound. "
Lawrence Osborne
Nature
Animals
Living
" 'The Odyssey' is a great poem to refugee-dom... Odysseus is not entirely a refugee... he's somebody who's blown off course. The entire book is an exploration of that theme... I reread it every year... That's not as surprising as it sounds, because it's a rip-roaring book. "
Lawrence Osborne
Book
Year
Great
" Many travelers get into trouble in places like Dubai by assuming that it is sufficiently Western for them to drink as they do back home. But elsewhere in the Muslim world, it is quite controlled, and the non-Muslim will be steered down a fairly narrow path. "
Lawrence Osborne
Trouble
Path
World