"train travel animated my imagination and usually gave me the solitude to order and write my thoughts: I traveled easily in two direction, along the level rails while Asia flashed changes at the window, and at the interior rim of a private world of memory and language. I cannot imagine a luckier combination."
"All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home. And I had learned what I had always secretly believed, that the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy-how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction."
