Lawrence Osborne

“My mother sent me and my sisters to Italy every year for language school, so I spent a lot of my teenage years in Florence and Rome. After university I went to Harvard for a year, dropped out, and then went to Paris, where I ended up staying 10 years. It's different from being American: If you're British, you're expected to live at the far corners.”

“I've spent most of my adult life in the United States, and there the celebrity culture has been entrenched for a long time. It has made people almost literally insane, even those who make a great show of repudiating it. Those people, like novelists, who can no longer enjoy this status are condemned to despise it.”

“In 'Snow for Mother', a mother waits for her little boy to grow up so that she can take him to Alaska to experience the real snow, which he never knew as a little boy in the tropics.”

“My grandfather was an amazing cap-in-hand guy.”

“New York was very congenial to me when I was young, like most people. I met my comrades in arms and partied hard. It's the way it should be, and then you get sick of it.”

“My parents were bookish, very musical, but otherwise uninvolved in the arts or the academic world.”

“My favorite whisky bar in the world is in my adopted Bangkok. A refined and secretive Japanese speakeasy among the girly bars of Soi 33, it's called Hailiang.”

“More than 700 years ago, the Song Dynasty artist Zheng Sixiao created perhaps the most beautiful image of orchids ever painted, 'Ink Orchid.' And still famous today is a thousand-year-old poem from the Tang Dynasty called 'Orchid and Orange.'”

“There's something attractive about making people temporarily forget their actual age by taking them out of their normal lives so completely. Doesn't travel, by its very nature, strive to do this?”

“The English are very indulgent to episodes of alcoholic insanity.”

“At the end of the 18th century, a young British explorer named George Bogle became one of the first Westerners to penetrate the mysterious and reclusive realm of Druk Yul, or 'Dragon Land.'”

“Mongolians are epic drinkers and carousers, and in this respect, they are extremely congenial to my own way of thinking.”

“In Bangkok's budding literary scene, Prabda Yoon sits at the centre.”

“I love the novel as a form, as an adventure of mind and soul. Really, I absolutely love writing them; they consume my days and nights - what can I say? But I am an avid film student, too: I watch a movie every night.”

“I spent a fair amount of time in Communist Poland when I was young - my wife was from there - and I had the impression that boredom was one of the things that was undermining that whole society from the inside.”

“One winter, I went to Erfoud to research trilobites and got to know the quarries, the dealers, and the remote mining villages. They are not easy places to visit, and this was a completely unknown corner of the world economy: children slaving away on desert cliffs to furnish wealthy collectors in San Francisco.”

“To me, the contemporary novel suffers from a lack of sense of place - or spirit of place, if you will. It's not important to most writers, I must assume, or they try to research a given background on sabbatical. Not for me. I write about places I've lived long before I ever set pen to paper.”

“For a long time I had wanted to take leave of Planet Tourism, to find one of those places that occasionally turn up in the middle pages of newspapers in far-flung cities, in which--we are told--a mad loner has been discovered who has lost all contact with the modern world. It seems inevitable that this desire will one day be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as Robinson Crusoe Syndrome.”

“That's all you do in life: you find your perch, and if it suits you, just carry on. There's nothing Graham Greene about it.”

“I think humans are migratory animals.”