At my
It was just a version of Rimbaud in Harar: the exile, a selfish beast with modest fantasies of power, secretly enjoying a life of beer drinking and scribbling and occasional mythomania in a nice clima...
At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.
In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.
Which proved yet again, as I had seen in many lands, that the Bible was often the happy hunting ground of an unbalanced mind.
Thought of Almeida Garrett, the mid-nineteenth-century Portuguese traveler and philosopher. An inspiration to me, Garrett had taken a trip in his own country, chronicled in Travels in My Homeland (Via...
Whenever an art form—music, book, drama, song—is dragged into the seminar rooms, it is finished as a force. Nothing is more deadly than the anatomizing of scholarship, since the study of art, any art—...
Truth is not a saga of alarming episodes; it is a detail, usually a small one, that gives a fiction life.
Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
The intrusion of outsiders in the day-to-day lives of Africans was the sort of thing I had always criticized.
The Chinese word for yak meant 'hairy cow'. It is a lovely long-haired animal, like a cow on its way to the opera.
Sometimes I miss Boston', I said. It was a timid confession. I missed it every day - its space, its familiar streets and smells. I missed the laughter, I missed the feel of American money which was li...
People will tell you, What’s the use? What’s the point of reading novels and poetry? They’ll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books w...
Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.
Mimicry reassures the weak, and the envious fool takes the risk as often as the visionary who mocks the error and leave the man alone.
Maputo was much praised as a desirable destination, but it was a dreary, beat-up city of desperate people who had cowered there while war raged in the provinces for twenty-five years, destroying bridg...
Less frightening, but no less disgusting, is the Iranian taste for jam made out of carrots.
In Cairo, there was a thin line between pestering and hospitality – indeed, they often amounted to the same thing, and although there were plenty of beggars there was little thievery.
I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.
I had some good friends - really funny ones. My best friend was a guy called Apolo Nsibambi. We shared an office at the Extra Mural Department at Makerere, and then I got a promotion - became Acting D...