When I was in Thailand, I went into the up-country because Marco Polo didn't get down into the flesh pots of Bangkok because they didn't exist in those days.

Everybody has done something about Marco Polo. It's the tiredest, most trite and worked-over subject in the world, and that was why it appealed to me, because I wanted to do something really new and different about something that had been worked over all these centuries, and I think I did.

When I was living in Mexico and writing a book called 'Aztec,' I had to make a deliberate effort to ignore a lot of the 'typically Mexican landscape' around me - banana and citrus groves, roses and carnations, burros and toros - because they did not exist in Mexico in the 15th century, the time of my book.

To get into Afghanistan, I bribed my way into a camel caravan of smugglers.

I could list hundreds of words I've come up against in the course of my work that did not exist in the era of which I was writing and for which I never could find a suitably old-time, archaic or obsolete substitute.

You can get awful famous in this country in seven days.