What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, butterflies settled in long fluffy tracts. There might be eighty feet of road carpete...
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.
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So fo...
The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It's a passion. And I can't understand people who don't want to travel.
You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
In a landscape of whites and blacks, the most conspicuous person I saw was this man, my first Indian in the South, the owner-manager of a motel, a dot Indian with a caste mark on his forehead rather t...
So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train...
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 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.
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.
Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.
You travel all over, the woman said. Do you write about your travels? I said, Yes, I did. Articles. Books. Whatever. You must write Paul Theroux-type travel books, she said. I said, Exactly, and told...
There's always a way if you're not in a hurry.
Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.
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 it...
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.
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...
When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, alt...
I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness.
The saddest task for the ironist is having to tell the listener that it's a joke, because of course it is never a joke.
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