Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.
…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures — I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road.
Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don’t know and trusting them with your life.
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
The difference between travel writing as fiction is 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.
If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.
In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.
Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.
Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night’s sleep, and strangers’ monologues framed like Russian short stories.
Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it.
…luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose…
You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back
You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.
I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I’d like to identify who it is. After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I thought: And who am I? Please tell me who I am and what I’m doing.
Last days? Don’t they know? These are the traits of all days, every day, everywhere.
Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.
As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere-the truer shout is not “Never again” but “Again and again.
At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom.
The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business, but it’s the only thing they’ve been allowed to do.
I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about.
Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine.
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.
Travel works best when you’re forced to come to terms with the place you’re in.
I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.
What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It’s like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself.
The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.
The idea of traveling in Africa for me is based on going by road or train or bus or whatever and crossing borders. You can’t travel easily or at all through some countries.
A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it’s usually a book about having a very bad time; having a miserable time, even better.
You define a good flight by negatives: you didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.
I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.
One of the things the ‘Tao of Travel’ shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don’t tell you who they were traveling with, and they’re not very reliable about things that happened to them.
The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It’s not about inventing.
Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn’t say that I’m a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels – and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t want people to ask me questions about it.
The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That’s happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn’t like it.
The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place.
I wouldn’t say that I’m a travel novelist, but rather a novelist who travels – and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It’s a passion. And I can’t understand people who don’t want to travel.
I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson’s on the main drag into maturity.