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.
Book of Revelation,
Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler inve...
Truth is not a saga of alarming episodes; it is a detail, usually a small one, that gives a fiction life.
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.
Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books.
Mimicry reassures the weak, and the envious fool takes the risk as often as the visionary who mocks the error and leave the man alone.
It takes a certain specialist’s dedication to travel in squalid cities and fetid slums, among the utterly dependant poor, who have lost nearly all of their traditions, and most of their habitat. You n...
In the midst of this scoured landscape, on a suburban street, I saw the church steeple, and Lucille slowed down and pointed, and waved me on. As I passed her to enter the parking lot, I thanked her, a...
I did not share their joy or feel very kindly toward any of them,
And then there are the laziest and most presumptuous of people, those who can read but who don’t bother, who live in the smuggest ignorance and seem to me dangerous.
It was just a version of Rimbaud in Harar: the exile, a selfish beast with modest fantasies of power, secretly enjoying a life of beer drinking and scribbling and occasional mythomania in a nice clima...
She looked a hundred years older, as stale and ruined as yesterday's oatmeal.
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.
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...
If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.
In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.
Thought of Almeida Garrett, the mid-nineteenth-century Portuguese traveler and philosopher. An inspiration to me, Garrett had taken a trip in his own country, chronicled in Travels in My Homeland (Via...
Whenever an art form—music, book, drama, song—is dragged into the seminar rooms, it is finished as a force. Nothing is more deadly than the anatomizing of scholarship, since the study of art, any art—...
The intrusion of outsiders in the day-to-day lives of Africans was the sort of thing I had always criticized.