A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride..

I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster..

Tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash--suspicious, unbelieving, and incurious..

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

It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians..

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….

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours..

Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel..

... Oceanic malaise. I never saw anyone reading anything more demanding than a comic book. I never heard any youth express an interest in science or ….

Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. T….

Painters paint outdoors, or in rooms full of people; they paint their lovers, alone, naked; they paint and eat; they paint and listen to the radio. I….

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

Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't k….

The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstance….

No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to….

The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space.

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..

The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing..

In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in ….

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us..

... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home..