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

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" I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose. "

" 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. "

" Love doesn't last. "

" 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. "

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

" A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride. "

" 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. "

" Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" There are two places that are hard to write about. A place like Britain, England in particular, which has been written about by everybody, and then the place that's never been written about. "

" I am happy being what I am. "

" 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. "

" Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Dentists seem to me very orderly, businesslike people who appear to become somewhat bored with the routine of their work after a period of time. Perhaps I'm wrong. "

" The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity. "

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

" 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. "

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

" My father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn't know what he did. But my kids were privy to the ups and downs of a writer's life. "

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

" I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees. "

" My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones. "