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.
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 and being tested. So that’s a great thing.
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, and then comes back and writes about it. It’s not about inventing.
I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
Travel books are all sorts – some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It’s many things.
You can’t write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.
When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.
People who don’t read books a lot are threatened by books.
People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.
My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.
I’m constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of one at the moment.
The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business, but it’s the only thing they’ve been allowed to do.
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 travel in. Something is almost cursed in striking oil. It’s like the lottery winner who ends up broke.
Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial – but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.
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 travels – and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom.
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 children under the palm trees.