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

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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine. "

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

" 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. "

" I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels. "

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

" Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation. "

" Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art. "

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