Occupation: Film Writer Birth: April 10, 1941
The biggest surprise was that a country like Angola, that has so much money, that produces so much oil, would be in such a mess and so difficult to t….
When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so….
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, le….
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..
The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fi….
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 anoth….
When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone ….
I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hop….
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….
The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the whole p….
Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled..
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..
My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me….
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind..
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 ….
When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there..
I think I understand passion. Love is something else..
Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.
Painters strike me as having warm uncomplicated friendships and probably more natural generosity than the practitioners of any other art. Perhaps thi….
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 chi….
Basically, what you find out is the limits of your patience and your strength and your capacity to adapt. You find that out in travel and being alone….