“So that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.”

I have three kids, the oldest is 18 and her friends are going to see it The Aristocrats because they told her they’re going to see it, especially her guy friends.

To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working; I fire up my laptop, and I’m in exactly the same place I was when I left home – that, to me, is a miracle.

Therefore, I think that in the celebration of the 50 years of the present reign, there must be research on the changes that the country has undergone, and in the future, it could be used as a lesson for our future actions.

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit.

Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.

The writer’s life: Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody’s fault. You chose it.

To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.

A tiny bundle of genetic material passed from one living entity to another, and has never stopped moving since. It was the moment of creation for us all.

Falling out of a posture means you are human; getting back into the posture means you are a yogi.

Absolute brain size does not tell you everything or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn’t have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.

Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.

Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men’s magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows…

I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.

A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can’t stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.