Occupation: Film Writer Birth: April 10, 1941
"Connected" is the triumphal cry these days. Connection has made people arrogant, impatient, hasty, and presumptuous... I don't doubt that instant co….
Is there any point in going across the world to eat something or buy something or watch people squatting among their ruins? Travel is a state of mind….
An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed..
People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction..
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….
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….
Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a s….
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….
Pain does not create a long-lasting memory, but the memory of luxury exerts itself for ever..
People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write thre….
I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don't want to relax. I want to see something..
It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources..
I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties..
Truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes..
Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion..
Bogotá seemed a cruel towering place, like an eagles' nest now inhabited by vultures and their dying prey..
A foreign swear-word is practically inoffensive except to the person who has learnt it early in life and knows its social limits..
Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who tr….
Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting yo….
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….
The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace..