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

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" People see a hungry face, and they want to feed it; that's a natural response. "

" I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction. "

" The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming. "

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

" 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. "

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

" The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Africa is really a place for the wealthy traveler. It's got some nice hotels, but they're very expensive hotels. It doesn't really cater to the backpacker or to the overland traveler. "

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

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

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

" I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home. "

" 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. "

" Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. "

" Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves. "

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

" 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. "

" Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial. "

" I do not want to be young again. "

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

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

" 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. "

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