“Every once in a while, people need to be in the presence of things that are really far away.”

“Sometimes travel is merely an opportunity taken when you can.”

“It reflects like an optical instrument and responds to changes in the weather so sensitively that it seems like a part of the sky rather than of the land. And along with all that, Baikal is distinc...”

“One very important key to maintaining our daily sanity is a simple scheduling tactic I call Putting Things the Hell Off.”

“When I go to Indian reservations in the West, and especially to the Pine Ridge Reservation, I sometimes feel unsure where to put my foot when I open the car door. The very ground is different from ...”

“America to me is so varied and exciting. I always feel nostalgia for the place I'm not in, and then I get there and find myself in a traffic jam going into the Lincoln Tunnel, and I think, 'God, wh...”

“Failed relationships can be described as so much wasted make-up.”

“Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good.”

“Aside from the obvious, Francesca, what do you want in return for supplying information? Bones asked, getting back to the subject. You to take me, she replied at once. Not gonna happen! I spat, squ...”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”

“Sometimes travel is merely an opportunity taken when you can.”

“In nothing is the difference between the Americans and the Soviets so marked as in the attitude, not only toward writers, but of writers toward their system. For in the Soviet Union the writer's jo...”

“Old stories sometimes slid out of her like lamp oil or light, stories containing details oblique and nearly incomprehensible to me or to anyone who has never known that world.”