Over the course of three decades I have put up in ratholes and sojourned in five-star hotels whose names fall on the ear like music: Claridge's, Halekulani, Raffles, Grand Hotel d'Angkor. Most typically I have been in the latter class of lodgings on someone else's dime.

I am in such a place now, propped up in bed on a high floor of the Sunset Tower in Los Angeles. The book I've been pretending to read has dropped from my chest. My thoughts are occupied with nothing much beyond the thick clouds scudding down from the Hollywood Hills and a wind-borne rain that is rattling the casement windows. I have what I need, and what I don't need is 3,000 miles behind me in New York.

I have a weekend ahead of me and nothing more urgent in mind than to drop into the Tower Bar for a meal. I may add to my itinerary an excursion down Sunset Boulevard to Book Soup, that wonderful bibliophile's holdout. Then again, I may not.

I am in what has become, after several visits, my regular room in this Art Deco tower that old-timers recall in its earlier incarnation as a place — according to the probably apocryphal tales people here tend to retail — where John Wayne once kept a cow on a terrace and Jim Morrison once tossed a television out a window into the pool.

The ghosts are long gone now. The place has been shined up according to a formula devised to modernize while maintaining a through-line to an old and largely vanished Hollywood. The stars still come, of course. The talent will hole up in suites while taking meetings, publicizing a picture or waiting to see how big a movie opens on a holiday weekend. You can sometimes see some movie deity huddled at poolside in a corner banquette.

BUT I don't come to the Sunset Tower in hope of glimpsing Johnny Depp, not really. I come, to be honest, because I'm familiar to the staff, because the maître d'hôtel lavishes guests with theatrical attention and because the waiter at lunch by now remembers that I like my Arnold Palmer made with unsweetened lemonade and replies to other requests I might have by saying, "My pleasure," and not the ubiquitous and hostile service-industry rejoinder "No problem."

I come because I am a student of hotel culture and I know how hard it can be to get these things right.

It has been that way always, ever since childhood when — like a minor character out of Jane Austen — accompanying a friendless young cousin, I made regular pilgrimages to a stuffy resort in the Pennsylvania mountains.

It was the sort of place that had baize green croquet lawns, deep porches that seemed miles long, a tidily lettered sign at the foot of a drive making clear to interlopers its exclusionary nature.

"Admission by Invitation Only," it read: a message vaguely exciting when you are 7 and don't yet comprehend what that actually means.

This particular resort hotel was a stupendous edifice, a place so anachronistic that people dressed for dinner, assembling in a long hall until a gong announced that the time had come to begin a stately progression into the brightly lighted dining room.

There, young waitresses in hairnets and starched scalloped aprons stood waiting, ready to circulate with cut-glass dishes of relish or warm Parker House rolls extracted from heated breadboxes slung over their shoulders.

In that place, in my neat madras blazer, crisp shirt and a tie that I was still too young to knot unaided, I sat stiffly at table, surveying a room full of ancients and combing the menu for breakfast options less arcane than finnan haddie or pheasant hash.

And it was there — ear already bent to conversational currents at nearby tables — that I first discovered, as all writers eventually do, that you hear stuff in hotels: late-night thumping, breaking glass, cries of passion and heart-rending sobs. You hear, as I did during one long night years later at the Connaught in London, what sounded like a couple engaged in an epic session of making love.

So pointless was it to resist the audible theatrics that I eventually climbed from bed and put an ear to the wall. Just as things seemed to be reaching a noisy climax, the room went abruptly silent; the guest in the next room had hit the remote.

You hear stories in hotels because strangers volunteer information. You hear gossip about the couple sitting mute and unhappy at a corner table, about the man traveling with a person who may or may not be his niece or about the spoiled celebrity who, having taken up residence at a hotel in Venice during the film festival there, complained that the clamor of the city's ancient church bells was disturbing her rest.

"She couldn't stand the bells," I was told one recent rainy afternoon in Venice by Francesca Bortolotto Possati, the blond Venetian aristocrat who owns the Bauer, a stolid 1940s building along a particularly poetic bend of the Grand Canal.

A deputation of assistants was dispatched to Ms. Possati's office to express the star's displeasure. Far from laughing off the complaint, Ms. Possati did as hoteliers often do and passed it along to a powerful friend, in this case the patriarch of Venice, who considered the matter and ordered the bells silenced until the diva left town.

The lesson here is that in hotels, secular miracles are routinely made to occur. The quotidian extravagances (costly, it's true) built into life at a decent hotel are not likely part of most people's daily existence. We dutifully make our beds and wash our dishes and clean our own tubs.

In hotels, however, we are only temporary citizens. And while I tip religiously and make efforts to leave my room in a decent state of order, I know that the smudge on the wall, the faulty plumbing, the nuisance of ownership belong to someone else. I bring my own baggage but leave the usual problems behind. At a hotel, the messy remnants of dinner can be guiltlessly pushed into a corridor.

Not everyone feels as I do about the nanny aspects of hotel life. An English friend would rather bed down on a sofa in a pal's tenement apartment than pass a night at the Pierre. It meant nothing to him when I recently related how a novelist of my acquaintance was rewarded for putting up with some slight inconvenience at that particular hotel with a FedEx delivery of a version of Pop-Tarts ordered from a specialty baker in Georgia. The writer had once mentioned liking them in an interview.

The magic effected in hotels can be as particular as that or a standard element of the hospitality. Long after forgetting the monuments and landmarks of Tokyo or even what it was that brought me there in the first place, I can with no trouble summon an image of the "amenities" provided at the Park Hyatt, that hotel on the high floors of a Shinjuku building, the one in which Bill Murray's lost soul encountered Scarlett Johansson's in "Lost in Translation."

I remember the black lacquered brushes. I remember the woven rattan trays from Bali. I remember a crackle-glazed platter left on a low coffee table to greet a dehydrated and jet-lagged guest on arrival. In its center was a kind of ikebana arrangement — one artful stem of perfectly ripened cherry tomatoes and, beside it, a mound of sea salt in a small ceramic bowl.

MY affinity for hotels runs deep and is lifelong. The long, vacant corridors, the sense of hidden workings, the shops selling Lilliputian sundries for the convenience of the forgetful, the monogrammed matchbooks, the old-fashioned bath mats stamped with an establishment's name all feel familiar. It amuses more than annoys me that "Do Not Disturb" is a universally empty injunction. (In places like India, in fact, it is usually interpreted to mean: "Please enter immediately and bring every person you have ever met.")

It occurs to me that this affinity may have been destined, given certain circumstances of my childhood. While I never really knew the woman my parents chose to be my godmother, in a photograph I have of her she looks movie-star lovely in the dated, too-adult manner of the 1950s. She was the daughter of the man who ran the Plaza Hotel and, though present at my baptism and the Palm Court reception that followed, she essentially vanished soon afterward.

In another part of this particular story, her father, having suffered financial reverses, walked out of one of the Plaza's 15th-floor windows. In families like mine, however, those in which fable has a tendency to blur into fact, there is no real way of knowing whether any, or all, of certain stories are true.

In any case my hotel life, like that of Eloise, seems to have started out early and at the Plaza, where once as a toddler left nestled amid the furs on the coat-bed during a party, I caused panic by disappearing. Eventually, of course, they found me, contemplating my mirrored reflection behind a bedroom door.

Even early on it must have dawned on me that you see yourself differently in hotels. You become anonymous, a different person, or else feel you could be one. You engage in a delusion that prevents people like Dominique Strauss-Kahn from remembering a simple reality of hotel life, the fact that someone is always watching. Hotels, it almost goes without saying, are the natural habitat of the voyeur.

Because this also suits me, I have watched with pleasure as Daphne Guinness teetered out of the Ritz bar in Paris on her vertiginous platform shoes; sunned myself alongside tattooed yakuza at the pool of the Halekulani in Waikiki; eaten dinner in an acacia boma in the East African bush alongside the family of a Russian mobster; been awakened in an elegant hotel in Bhutan when rowdy guests came banging on the door at 2 a.m.

Groggily pulling on a robe, I got up to see what the revelers wanted and was greeted by a woozy Cameron Diaz, grinning her lopsided movie-star smile.

Unlike the characters in "Lost in Translation," I don't associate hotels with the onset of anomie. I relish feeling simultaneously somewhere and nowhere, an experience a French friend characterizes as being dépaysé. You can render the word in a variety of ways, the most usual being "out of one's element," a translation I find imperfect, lacking as it does a sense of rootless irresponsibility that goes a long way toward explaining things people get up to in hotels.

Like any rational person, I enter even the most posh lodgings aware of the limits of room spray, alert to the fact that I am in a biosphere rich in other people's DNA. I am aware that the bed may have cooled just moments before my arrival, and I also know by now to ditch the bedspread at first chance because, as the gossip columnist Cindy Adams once put it with jaunty crassness, "That thing has seen more action than Kim Kardashian."

Doubtless, this is as true of the fabled Oriental in Bangkok as it is of a Best Western in Gallup, N.M., and it is certainly the case that I feel lucky to have stayed at both.

It is a borrowed privilege to be able to riff with well-off acquaintances about the relative merits of the Ritz or the Bristol in Paris. Yet while I've been spoiled and content in those luxurious settings, I was seldom happier in them than I was the summer I spent writing a script for an indie movie in a parking lot motel in New Mexico.

Perhaps what I loved was being in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps it was the limitless horizon outside my door. It was not the room itself, which was plain and penitentiary stark, faintly perfumed with Pine-Sol and which cost, as I remember, $27 a night. Perhaps it was the change of perspective, something I discovered again last December when I sat in a room at a Best Western in Gallup and gazed past truck rigs idling in a snow-dusted lot.

Out the window three parallel lines cut straight through the landscape. Close in was Route 66; beyond it were rail tracks and a die-straight slash of Interstate. The thrill of all that blurring movement was balanced nicely by the reassuring safety one somehow feels in an overheated room with a picture window vista of mackerel-sky infinity.

There is more to hotel life, of course, than maid service and ready access to a 24-hour ice machine. There are the innkeepers, for example. Few are as heroic as Karambir Singh Kang, the general manager of the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai, who rescued guests while his own wife and children perished in the 2008 terrorist attacks.

Many, I am forced to conclude, are not even hospitable. Yet an instinct to protect and shelter must operate in those who enter the hotel trade. How else to account for the clerk who, during the bitter winter of the Romanian revolution in 1989, found a bed for a photographer friend and me, in a hotel packed with foreign press and aid workers, keeping the two of us from freezing to death in our car?

This all seems far off now as I putter around my room at the Sunset Tower, watching wind shred confetti petals from the bougainvillea on a small terrace. Every now and then I get up to gaze down at the rain and the headlights moving below a billboard for some Prada perfume.

If, despite the familiar warm welcome that greets me each time I enter the lobby here, I do not feel precisely at home, I am anyhow relieved of the worries that come with being a transient.

That, too, is something I've come to value about hotel stays: how in the accustomed rituals and formalities of arrival and departure, each visit mimics a larger journey. We arrive and go to our rooms and feel relief when the key works and the lock clicks tight so that we can unpack and greet our identities again. We unfold the clothes that we prepared for a temporary imagined future. And in that transition, the span between check-in and check-out, we are liberated from the uncomfortable truth that, sooner than anyone likes to imagine, the trip has ended and the time has come to pay the bill.