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

Love doesn't last.

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

My greatest inspiration is memory.

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.

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

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.