Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.

It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.

I feel like it has gone very fast for me, but I feel like it wasn't instantaneous, at all. I was getting a lot of rejections. I just got very lucky and it happened quickly for me. I don't feel like I'm a prodigy or something.

I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

I do fish. I think there is a connection between thinking and fishing mostly because you spend a lot of time up to your waist in water without a whole lot to keep your mind busy.

I always told my dad I'd play professional football.

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.

You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.

My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.

For me it was perfect, because it wasn't a very competitive environment, and it was a studio program. They basically send you off, and say, bring us some work, and we'll help you improve it. It really rewarded self-discipline.

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.

But then of course you reach a point where you have to say, I've got to figure out how this book's going to end. Otherwise, you're going to write yourself into so many dead-ends.

It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.

An unexpected benefit of my career in biochemistry has been travel.

The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them.

Strange - is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the road Which to discover we must travel too.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.

I think travel is probably the downside of playing professional golf, but you've got to do it.

Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.

The person attempting to travel two roads at once will get nowhere.

Right now I'm so old that if I had a big gush of money, I don't know what I'd do with it. I don't travel anymore. I don't need anything, don't want anything. I'd give it to my son, I guess, and let him enjoy it.

I might have been born in a hovel but I am determined to travel with the wind and the stars.

I think that somebody with the resources and innovation and the idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up with a successful space travel program.

You can't expect the entire world to come to New York to see you. You have to travel to them.

Travel, of course, narrows the mind.

If you have enthusiasm, you have a very dynamic, effective companion to travel with you on the road to Somewhere.

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

Some go on to trade schools or get further training for jobs they are interested in. Some go into the arts, some are craftsmen, some take a little time out to travel, and some start their own businesses. But our graduates find and work at what they want to do.

You and I come by road or rail, but economists travel on infrastructure.

If you travel first class, you think first class and you are more likely to play first class.

Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

Well, I took a sabbatical. I walked away from shooting movies because I couldn't handle the travel. I'm a single parent. I had young kids, and I found that keeping in touch with them from hotel rooms and airports wasn't working for me. So I stopped.

I sometimes think that Thomas Cook should be numbered among the secular saints. He took travel from the privileged and gave it to the people.

But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

I really wish we could stay longer in the countries we visit, but I've been lucky to have visited most of them before, because I've done a tremendous amount of travel.

I never subscribe to the stay-at-home policy. I'm not sick of the road or sick of eating in good restaurants around the country. I like to travel.

I'd like to be able to travel anywhere in an instant.

In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children.

I'd rather have huge success and huge failures than travel in the middle of the road.