There are two worlds: the world of the tourist and the world of everyone else. Often they’re side by side. But the tourist doesn’t actually see how people live.
If you’re a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don’t like other people. I’m not like that, I don’t think.
Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it’s a paradox of this sort of parallel life. A safari is an expensive experience and it’s adjacent to a place where people are having a very tough time.
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.