I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.

There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.

I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties.

I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, it needs an angle, it needs a 'sound bite.

An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.

I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble.

What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself.

Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. 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.

Travel magazines are just one cupcake after another. They're not about travel. The travel magazine is, in fact, about the opposite of travel. It's about having a nice time on a honeymoon, or whatever.

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.

Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.

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.