Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on ...

Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.

I am happy being what I am.

My greatest inspiration is memory.

I sought trains; I found passengers.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

There's always a way if you're not in a hurry.

travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.

You can't want to be a writer. You have to be one.

Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.

I think I understand passion. Love is something else.

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

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

Reading is also a journey. It's a process of discovery.

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

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

I've never spent a whole year in one place without leaving.

Truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes.

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.

Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.

Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.

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

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

All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting.

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.

... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.

The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing.

One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.

One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.

Reading liberates you. You could know about the world through reading.

The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space

I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.

One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.

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

...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.

Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.

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

It's not fashionable but I like to spit out of the window of a moving train.

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

There's a lot of sensuality that I associate with travel. And that's romance.

It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.

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