Albert Frederick Mummery and Chris Bonington are the British climbers I most admire.

I produce schnapps on my farm but I'm not fond of drinking it.

I learned to ski in the Dolomites at the age of five. Ski lifts didn't exist then, so I did everything on foot.

My father had been a Wehrmacht officer in the second world war and was a violent and damaged man.

There's another problem," Percy said. "I'm not good with air travel. It's dangerous for a son of Neptune." "You'll have to risk it...and so will I," Frank said. "By the way, we're related." Percy almost stumbled off the roof. "What?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

My greatest inspiration is memory.

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 house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.

People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.

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

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.

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.