It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions….

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

One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect..

You must not judge people by their country. In South America, it is always wise to judge people by their altitude..

My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me….

One of the upsides of tourism is that people begin to take themselves a little more seriously (and think their) culture is worth something. So rather….

Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive..

He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone..

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 soci….

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….

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 frame….

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time..

Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion..

Reading is also a journey. It's a process of discovery..

A person who is tired of London is not necessarily tired of life; it might be that he just can’t find a parking place..

I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom..

You can't want to be a writer. You have to be one..

It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places..

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of h….

A French traveler with a sore throat is a wonderful thing to behold, but it takes more than tonsillitis to prevent a Frenchman from boasting..

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 ….