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.
All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet’s hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man’s way of heading home.
The traveler’s boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience – shocking though it may seem at the time – is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.
There has to be a measure of difficulty or problem-solving in travel for it to be worthwhile.
Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.
I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.
A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler. Nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness.
If people are driving you around to look at animals, that’s wonderful. That’s educational, but it’s not necessarily enlightening and you’re not finding out much about yourself.
It’s not fashionable but I like to spit out of the window of a moving train.
I don’t think that it’s possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it’s simple.
Although I’m not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.
Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.
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 another four years and I didn’t make a phone call. So for six years I didn’t make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.
I don’t want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.
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.