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

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" 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. "

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

" My record was so bad that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troublemaker and was accepted as a volunteer only after a great deal of explaining and arguing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Love doesn't last. "

" Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind. "

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

" The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that equals the Yangtze River, that equals the Nile. We have the greatest cities in the world - among the greatest cities in the world. "

" I think I am typical in believing that the Peace Corps trained us brilliantly and then did little more except send us into the bush. It was not a bad way of running things. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Nyasaland was the perfect country for a volunteer. It was friendly and destitute; it was small and out-of-the-way. It had all of Africa's problems - poverty, ignorance, disease. "

" 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. "

" My earliest thought, long before I was in high school, was just to go away, get out of my house, get out of my city. I went to Medford High School, but even in grade school and junior high, I fantasized about leaving. "

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

" 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. "

" You leave the States, and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you. "

" 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. "

" The people I've known who've done great things of that type - you know, building hospitals, running schools - are very humble people. They give their lives to the project. "

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

" Travel magazines are just one cupcake after another. They're not about travel. The travel magazine is, in fact, about the opposite of travel. It's about having a nice time on a honeymoon, or whatever. "