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 on. I certainly don’t feel I need his approval, although maybe that’s because I’m confident that I’ve got it.
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 tiny, so lost.
Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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 understand why a tourist economy is necessary.
I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.
Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.
The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate’s career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.
Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer-a mediocre poet.
The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space.
All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting.
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 of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory.
Truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes.
A foreign swear-word is practically inoffensive except to the person who has learnt it early in life and knows its social limits.
I’m a tourist, a glorified tourist. I’m not doing it to have a good time or to lie in the sun.
One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy – how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
The monotony of staying in one place is the best thing for writing a novel. Having regular habits, a kind of security, but especially no big surprises, no shocks.
All politicians, even the most idealistic ones, are looking for money, sucking up to rich people.
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 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, letters, and notebooks from a writer’s life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.