I'd waste a holiday trying to set a story in this new place I'd visit, whereas I would never write a story about Indianapolis.

Everyone thinks that a new place or a new identity will jumpstart a new life.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

On my first trip to New York in the 1980s, the first place I wanted to visit was the Plaza Hotel, home to Kay Thompson's Eloise.

That slave narratives existed at all implied a satisfactory conclusion to the journey - the attainment of literacy, the escape to the place where one could reflect on the experience of bondage and the flight to freedom, and, in the early days of the slave trade, the conversion to Christianity.

In New York, they like winners. They don't like second place.