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" Some instinct - and I think it was a correct one - led me to do something difficult enough to give my life meaning. "

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" I just don't see myself as a travel writer. I can't. I don't. "

" In 10000 BC, all human beings were hunter-gatherers; by 1500 AD, 1 percent were hunter-gatherers. Less than .001 percent of people are hunter-gatherers today. "

" During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve. "

" I love the desert and its incomparable sense of space. "

" Australia's arid western region, from the town of Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean coast, is a beautiful, haunting, but largely empty land. Dominated by the harsh, almost uninhabited Great Sandy and Gibson deserts, the region is known only to Australian Aborigines, a handful of white settlers, and the few travelers who motor across it. "

" In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to godliness. The Hindu sadhu, the pilgrims of Compostela walking past their sins, the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora, the haj. "

" Some of the best conversations I've had are sitting around a camp fire. "

" Camels are still trained in Alice Springs for tourist jaunts and for occasional sale to Australia's zoos. "

" The truth is I'm not really interested in travel writing as it's generally conceived, and even less so in female travel writing. "

" I do believe that the genre reached its peak before the First World War. "

" I try to factor solitude into my life because more and more, that's becoming a very precious and rare commodity. "

" I think people are frightened by different things, so I don't see myself as particularly courageous. "

" If you are fragmented and uncertain, it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt. "

" When 'Tracks' first came out, I was courted by Sydney Pollack. I had lunch with him, and he opened the conversation with, 'Honey, you ain't gonna like what I'm gonna do to your book.' I really liked him, but I turned him down, because - well, I was stupid. I also turned down a great deal of money. "

" The desert is natural; when you are out there, you can get in tune with your environment, something you lose when you live in the city. "

" I'd always loved writing, in the same way that I'd loved painting. I wouldn't have seen it as a career. "

" As you get older, you do just get tired. "

" The two important things I did learn were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavor is taking the first step, making the first decision. "

" My sense of myself is that I was a rather unformed kind of person trying to make myself up out of bits of spit and string. "

" My thoughts can sometimes be spurred by what I read, but my reading is extremely eclectic. "

" These days I am ruled by doubt, and that is a difficult place to write from. "

" Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore. "

" You can trick yourself into doing things by doing it one step at a time and never letting yourself see the overall picture. "

" My own memories are packed tightly away. I very rarely bring them out for viewing. "

" I've chosen difficult men. But then I'm sure they'd say they'd chosen a difficult woman. "

" When I was young, I thought I wouldn't be a good mother. Now I think I would be, but I'm too long in the tooth. "

" You really can expand the boundaries of your life and do risky things and prove yourself by doing them. "

" The genre has moved into this commercial aspect of itself, and ignored this extraordinarily rich literature that's filed everywhere else except under travel. "

" That arrogance of youth and that kind of ignorant confidence can get you through a whole lot of things, and then life does its stuff, and you get smashed around and beaten up. You get full of doubts, and you end up making a person out of those bits and pieces. "

" The idea of finding things out, I hope that will stay with me until I drop. "