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" 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. "

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" '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

" 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? "

" 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. "

" The Gobi is in many ways like the old American West, filled with abandoned hamlets and buildings, traces of disappeared peoples. Across its oceanic blond grass, horses and the black silhouettes of camels move languidly, as if they are the only inhabitants. Ancient Turkic nomads left enigmatic petroglyphs carved into boulders 2,000 years ago. "

" I suppose I reached the limit of what I could do with nonfiction books, perhaps because they never felt quite intense enough - it's a journalistic enterprise, ultimately, even if you are using the memoir as a form. "

" 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. "

" New York was very congenial to me when I was young, like most people. I met my comrades in arms and partied hard. It's the way it should be, and then you get sick of it. "

Lawrence Osborne

Young

People

" 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. "

" Shoes tell you a lot about someone. Think of 'Strangers on a Train.' The first thing we see are Bruno's shoes. We know right away that something is up. "

" So many writers live their whole lives in rooms. You can be too civilised in the environment you have around you, too oriented towards speaking engagements and literary festivals and dinner parties. That has no interest for me these days. You get to a point where you don't care anymore. At that point, you can start to write. "

Lawrence Osborne

You

Start

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I made the decision that I didn't want to spend my life in rooms and write about rooms, or else make books that are researched constructs. I think you do have to get out there and live it. Thriller and genre writers seem to understand this. "

" 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. "

" My parents were bookish, very musical, but otherwise uninvolved in the arts or the academic world. "

" 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.' "

" My grandfather was an amazing cap-in-hand guy. "

" Sometimes you can publish a first novel in a kind of lyrical flourish, but it is not really a lyrical form. The beautiful truths about the world are more hard won than that. Novels should be bleach boned. It's a question of cumulative observation and lived suffering. It takes time. "

" I've spent most of my adult life in the United States, and there the celebrity culture has been entrenched for a long time. It has made people almost literally insane, even those who make a great show of repudiating it. Those people, like novelists, who can no longer enjoy this status are condemned to despise it. "

" I'll wager there isn't a human being on earth who doesn't believe in luck, however rational they pretend to be in public life. In reality, most of human life is luck - and, of course, its darker, more prevalent opposite. One only has to live long enough to experience both. "

" Arak means 'sweat' in Arabic, and it is the perfect Mediterranean after-dinner drink, in my opinion. "

" 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

Think

Nice

" 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. "

" 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

Never

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The best times to visit the Gobi and Three Camel Lodge are June, and September through October. By the beginning of November, it is ferociously cold, while October can swing surreally between warm days and clear, chilly nights and frosty mornings dusted with snow - perfect. "