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

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" An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed. "

" 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. "

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

" I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels. "

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

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

" I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone babbling. "

" The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place. "

" People say writing is really hard. That's very unfair to those who are doing real jobs. People who work in the fields or fix roofs, engineers, or car mechanics. I think lying on your back working under an oily car, that's a job. "

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

" A journey awakens all our old fears of danger and risk. Your life is on the line. You are living by your own resources; you have to find your own way and solve every problem on the road. "

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

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

" Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter. "

" Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves. "

" I am happy being what I am. "

" The Trans-Siberian Express is like a cruise across an oceanic landscape. I've done it three times. "

" The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it. "

" The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It's a passion. And I can't understand people who don't want to travel. "

" The idea of traveling in Africa for me is based on going by road or train or bus or whatever and crossing borders. You can't travel easily or at all through some countries. "

" 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. "

" Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, it needs an angle, it needs a 'sound bite. "

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

" People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction. "

" When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost. "

" Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial. "

" Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine. "

" I've never spent a whole year in one place without leaving. "

" 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 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. "