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.
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.
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.
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.