People my age and younger do think much more towards Europe. We have to fill the gap sometime - we can't think we are an empire any longer after all.

Originally I wanted to be a diplomat, and by attrition I started giving up that idea.

In both places [Paraguay and Newfoundland] people rise despite everything - both are pretty tough environments.

There are 60 million of us [britains] crammed into an area the size of a state. So you don't have that feeling of remoteness at all, ever. And that's reflected in the way our media works, and so on.

I tend to prefer traveling in the Third World countries. Like Ethiopia. Or Eritrea.

Paraguay has had a U.S. supermarket boss as its ambassador for a while. He did the job well. He was there because he wanted to be there. Rather than the British diplomat who didn't want to be there.

I don't want to pay good money to hear ordinary people's lunatic views. Most of the people who phone in are [lunatics] - certainly in Britain.

This terrible frustration that we so often feel in the West in not being able to articulate and express ourselves.

I feel better off doing what I know how to do. I feel a strong element of fictional style in travel writing anyway. Some call it creative nonfiction.

I was talking to my publisher in Britain and was told here we are - we are sixty million people and we reckon only four hundred thousand people in Britain really read.

I find the public reaction to writing - it's fascinating in this modern age. Of course people are able to interact with me and email me, and I get quite a few I suppose.

Hard work and dedications may lead a person towards better tomorrow.

Fairy tales are experienced by their hearers and readers, not as realistic, but as symbolic poetry.

All people are born creative. And there's nobody who's helpless, nobody.

Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.

Sinn Fein has productively taken the example of South Africa and, as we develop the peace process, we continue to use examples from South Africa.

The true scientist never loses the faculty of amazement.

I don't believe all this nonsense about market timing. Just buy good value and when the market is ready that value will be recognized.

I will not have Botox. You know why? Because I eat! I eat the fat, I eat the vegetable, I eat everything. If you exercise and you don't eat enough, it takes its toll on the skin.

Men are most powerfully affected by those evils which themselves feel, or which appear before their own eyes.

Most Radiohead songs are actually REM songs, I just have a mentally ill child read the lyrics aloud and then I change the melodies a bit.