The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and t….

Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled..

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

Writers are painful friends, and they are seldom friendly with others. They are insecure in the presence of other writers. Composers of certain kinds….

One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone..

All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting..

Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I've ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one f….

I never stay with people and I never look people up when I travel. I depend more on just chance meetings. The advantage is that people don't know who….

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

What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry..

A foreign swear-word is practically inoffensive except to the person who has learnt it early in life and knows its social limits..

I don't look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren't there, there would be no economy. So I unders….

Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't..

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 a….

For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer..

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect..

I sought trains; I found passengers..

So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison….

In a way, Che Guevara's fate was far worse than Simon Bolivar's. Guevara's collapse was complete: his intentions were forgotten, but his style was ta….

I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twent….

My greatest inspiration is memory..