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.

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.

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.

I felt sure we could gain the upper hand by putting ourselves in the mindset of the Incas.

Screw the shops

Why ruin the present by talking about the past?

The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.

The game of baseball is made up of many little things. If we do all the little things right, then we'll never have a big thing to worry about

I know who I am, how I was. I don't want to know how I will be because nobody knows that.

I'm used to working really hard to get a role. I was always auditioning and talking my way into roles.

People who live in glasshouses might as well answer the door

When I saw you fall..." "You thought, 'Wow, she's a loser.

If there are atheists, who is to be blamed if not the mercenary tyrants of souls who, in revolting us against their swindles, compel some feeble spirits to deny the God whom these monsters dishonour?