Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists.
I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.
I added that it was no fun to grow old, but that the compensation for it was that time turned your mental shit-detector into a highly calibrated instrument.
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 bu...
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.
If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think.
We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose.
Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
The three biggest funerals in Alabama history define the state’s contending loyalties, I was told: George Wallace’s, Martin Luther King’s, and Bear Bryant’s.
The Chinese word for yak meant 'hairy cow'. It is a lovely long-haired animal, like a cow on its way to the opera.
That was my Malawian epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. All the others, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.
That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome.
Sometimes I miss Boston', I said. It was a timid confession. I missed it every day - its space, its familiar streets and smells. I missed the laughter, I missed the feel of American money which was li...
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.
Maputo was much praised as a desirable destination, but it was a dreary, beat-up city of desperate people who had cowered there while war raged in the provinces for twenty-five years, destroying bridg...
Less frightening, but no less disgusting, is the Iranian taste for jam made out of carrots.
In Cairo, there was a thin line between pestering and hospitality – indeed, they often amounted to the same thing, and although there were plenty of beggars there was little thievery.
I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, Thoreau wrote in his essay Life Without Principle, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with trivia...
But, truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes.
At my