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" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there. "

" Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation. "

" You may not know it but I'm no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in. "

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

" Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. "

" A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about having a very bad time; having a miserable time, even better. "

" One of the things the 'Tao of Travel' shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them. "

" I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation. "

" I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster. "

" Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. "

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

" 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. "

" A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I don't look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren't there, there would be no economy. So I understand why a tourist economy is necessary. "

" I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about. "

" 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. "