I knew the shirt-swapping business in general was getting out of hand when opponents would ask me for my shirt while we were still mid-match. Those are the wrong priorities.

It's the thing I miss about football, I suppose: being with the team day-in day-out, getting a team ready for a Saturday afternoon, or getting yourself ready for a Saturday afternoon - it's the most difficult part.

In the periods of my career when I stopped passing the ball forward or when I stopped looking for the risky pass that might open up a defence, the consequences were the same. The manager stopped picking me. I got back into the team when I went back to doing it the way he wanted.

To beat opposing teams, you have to attack, and to attack, you have to take risks.

Saturday afternoon is the hardest thing. I can go out and watch games, but I'm constantly on my phone looking at results: what score is this, what score is that. You have no real involvement, but you're obsessed with it.

To go and watch Manchester United, whether it's home or away, is entertainment; it's goals - whether you concede goals or whether you can score goals.

OK, so I never had a transfer in my career, but I used to love deadline day: Dimitar Berbatov turning up at Manchester airport with hours to go, Robinho coming to Manchester City instead of Chelsea.

In my world, the dressing room was sacrosanct. The only time anyone was permitted to take pictures in there was when we had won a trophy.

United fans don't care if the team only has 40 per cent possession as long as they are watching an attacking team. My experience was that the supporters understood that even our best teams, even the teams with Peter Schmeichel or Edwin van der Sar in goal, were going to concede goals.

Playing in attack is difficult. You are under scrutiny, and you have to be able to deal with that.

Modern managers have a lot of demands on them, and many feel, with justification, that they do not have the time to commit to watching the junior sides.

As a finisher, there are few players as composed as Messi. When you can score as many different kinds of goal as he can, you have every reason to be confident.

People say that Rooney could have been like Lionel Messi, a more prolific goalscorer who dribbles past opponents more. But they are different characters. You will never see Messi snapping around the heels of an opponent to win the ball back deep in his own half. Wayne does that all the time, and sometimes that enthusiasm will count against him.

To continue playing late into your twenties in the same style that you once played as a teenager is not possible.

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.

The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the whole point of work, of life, of love.'

I am happy being what I am.

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

Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

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

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.

Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.

A place that doesn't welcome tourists, that's really difficult and off the map, is a place I want to see.

Dentists seem to me very orderly, businesslike people who appear to become somewhat bored with the routine of their work after a period of time. Perhaps I'm wrong.

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

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.

Nyasaland was the perfect country for a volunteer. It was friendly and destitute; it was small and out-of-the-way. It had all of Africa's problems - poverty, ignorance, disease.

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial.

You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

I think I understand passion. Love is something else.

If you look at a map, you see that Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. It's 17 hours of straight flying from London. It's very far away, and sometimes you feel as if you're on another planet. But I like that. Also, that's ideal for writing.

People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.

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.

People see a hungry face, and they want to feed it; that's a natural response.

The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It's a passion. And I can't understand people who don't want to travel.

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.

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

The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that equals the Yangtze River, that equals the Nile. We have the greatest cities in the world - among the greatest cities in the world.

The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.

When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.

There are places that I've always wanted to go. First I went to Africa, and when I was there I realized there were places in Africa I really to wanted to visit: The Congo, West Africa, Mombassa. I wanted to see the deep, dark, outlandish places.

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.

Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.