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

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

" 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. "

" Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. "

" You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. "

" A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form. "

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

" 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 idea of traveling in Africa for me is based on going by road or train or bus or whatever and crossing borders. You can't travel easily or at all through some countries. "

" 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. "

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

" I am happy being what I am. "

" The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something - a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unusual is a very sustaining thing in travel. "

" My greatest inspiration is memory. "

" If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think. "

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

" 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. "

" The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given. "

" 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. "

" The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness. "

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

" 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. "

" I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader. "

" I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't want people to ask me questions about it. "

" What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself. "

" I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write. "

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

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

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

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

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