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.

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.

Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.

I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone babbling.

You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.

Africa is really a place for the wealthy traveler. It's got some nice hotels, but they're very expensive hotels. It doesn't really cater to the backpacker or to the overland traveler.

I was kind of raised with the suggestion that I had a duty to do; that life was real, life was earnest. And I hated that, actually. I needed to be liberated, to be told that I could live the life that I wanted to live; that I didn't need a job, or to be shouted at; that I could be myself; that I could be happy.

Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.

The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.

Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall.

My father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn't know what he did. But my kids were privy to the ups and downs of a writer's life.

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.

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.

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.

It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.

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.

People who don't read books a lot are threatened by books.

I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster.

When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home.

When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen.

Love doesn't last.

The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.

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.

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.

The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.

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.

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.

My greatest inspiration is memory.

To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration.

One of the things the 'Tao of Travel' shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them.

The people I've known who've done great things of that type - you know, building hospitals, running schools - are very humble people. They give their lives to the project.

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.

I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't want people to ask me questions about it.

People say writing is really hard. That's very unfair to those who are doing real jobs. People who work in the fields or fix roofs, engineers, or car mechanics. I think lying on your back working under an oily car, that's a job.

I feel as if my mission is to write, to see, to observe, and I feel lazy if I'm not reaching conclusions. I feel stupid. I feel as if I'm wasting my time.

What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one's whole life.

A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about having a very bad time; having a miserable time, even better.

There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go.

You leave the States, and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you.

The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.