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" The place that interests me most, actually, is the United States. I've realized that I haven't traveled much in the States. There's a lot to see. "

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" One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else. "

" I feel as if my mission is to write, to see, to observe, and I feel lazy if I'm not reaching conclusions. I feel stupid. I feel as if I'm wasting my time. "

" 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. "

" Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tedium, and this is why I choose to travel alone. "

" The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth. "

" I do not want to be young again. "

" 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. "

" Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent. "

" 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. "

" To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. "

" There are two worlds: the world of the tourist and the world of everyone else. Often they're side by side. But the tourist doesn't actually see how people live. "

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

" When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen. "

" Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in. "

" Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall. "

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

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

" When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places. "

" My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it. "

" The more you write, the more you're capable of writing. "

" There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go. "

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

" When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "