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

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.

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.

When you try to take someone's pain away from them, you don't make it better. You just tell them it's not OK to talk about their pain.

I've been clawing my way to directing since I was a kid.

It's so graceless, being a martyr. It's honoring your adversaries too much.

At one point, I said to the officials that you guys haven't called walking for 20 years, now you don't know what it is. When you call walking, you're about half right.

I'm not really one for regrets.

I can't help from making money, that is all.

As we learn to speak from the heart we are changing the habits of a lifetime.

Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children.

They are either people of faith who have lost their faith from reading my books, or they are people who had already lost their faith, and something about my books encouraged them to affirm that.

Attention is the intention to live without reservation in the here-and-now.