I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.

Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.

There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.

You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.

You can't save the rhinos and you can't preserve a culture. I'm very pessimistic. Once it's gone, it's over.

All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.

Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.

Tibet has a very proud people but it's culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It's like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it's gone.

No ideology or psychological theory can possibly do justice to the full range of human experience.

A mother is an unrelenting source of love.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Vanity is a motive of immense potency.

There is light in the world, and it is us!

It was a rather extraordinary conversation if you think about it -- both of us speaking in code. But not military code, not Intelligence or Resistance code -- just feminine code.

I feel like I'm 1,000. I don't feel I'm young enough a lot of the time.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

In order that the mortar in the joints may not suffer from frosts, drench it with oil-dregs every year before winter begins. Thus treated, it will not let the hoarfrost enter it.

The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever.