For me, nature is something you watch on the Discovery Channel, or on the evening news -- as you learn how much more of it's been savaged to make way for the Blackberry realm that is my home

As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end.

Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.

For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.

Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things.

A little imagination goes a long way in Fes.

One senses that, in these conditions, no amount of wet-wiping could bring true hygiene.

The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.

It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.

Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.

The idea of my heart dancing with delight was far too good to pass up.

Against an oath

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

I think it's really important for your mental health to think about the big questions, to discuss them and open your mind, in order to prepare you for both life and death.

I won't be able to do what I'm doing forever. There aren't that many scripts floating around for fifty-year-old chicks.

The attack is that process by means of which you remove obstructions.

You watch the Supreme Court in action on these cases, and they are a conflicted court. However, when it comes to speech issues generally, the court has been protective.

The artist must know how far to go too far.

It's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not go away completely, but after a while it's not so overwhelming.

If no other knowledge deserves to be called useful but that which helps to enlarge our possessions or to raise our station in society, then Mythology has no claim to the appellation.