On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as gifts, and a few days later I decided to cycle to India...However, I was a cunning child so I kept my ambition to myself, thus avoiding the tolerant amusement it would have provoked among my elders.

poverty denotes a lack of necessities and simplicity a lack of needs.

Is this something else our age does - on the one hand make communication easier than ever before, while on the other hand widening the gulf between those who are 'developed' and those who are not?

... I know a number of Western children who would benefit greatly if only someone were primitive enough to inhibit the development of their personalities.

The more I see of life in these 'undeveloped countries' and of the methods adopted to 'improve' them, the more depressed I become. It seems criminal that the backwardness of a country like Afghanistan should be used as an excuse for America and Russia to have a tug-of-war for possession.

I wonder if those experts who tell us that our sexual appetite is the strongest know what real thirst feels like I can imagine the desire for water driving someone to commit a crime to which sexual desire could never drive them.

Buying a bicycle is a momentous event, akin to marriage: you are acquiring a partner.

There are two phases of enjoyment in journeying through an unknown country - the eager phase of wondering interest in every detail, and the relaxed phase when one feels no longer an observer of the exotic, but a participator in the rhythm of daily life.

[On Addis Ababa:] Among the city's handicaps are an immaturity for which no one can be blamed, as it was founded only eighty years ago, and a proliferation of architectural excesses for which many people can and should be blamed.

It is far easier to explain to a three-year-old how babies are made than to explain the processes whereby bread or sugar appear on the table.

... strong bonds are forged in high emotional temperatures.

hatred, however apparently justifiable, excusable or inevitable, always damages the hater.

apartheid still hangs in the air like a poisonous cloud left over from chemical warfare.

Undoubtedly the Afghans must be, by our standards, the best-looking people in the world. They have everything height, proportions, carriage, features and complexion.