I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual.

Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.

Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of the Serenissima

To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.

To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

the personality of St. John's, Newfoundland, hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.

I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.

The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.

Leningrad ... is a city with the gift of timelessness.

The sharper the arrow the quicker the hunt.

That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.

Don't lick your wounds unless you care to taste the sting a second time.

Parenting has no guide book

She didn't want to be the human race. It sounded too big a responsibility.

There are acres of diamonds in the problem you have before you right now.

Their plan had been very simple: to stay together for the rest of their lives.

I just don't want to get caught up in the hype.

In life we often look to others for simple, but difficult answers, despite the fact that we have those answers ourselves.

Why art thou but a nest of gloom While the bobolinks are singing?