Since I will never write the autobiography I once envisioned—volume one, Who I Was; volume two, I Told You So—writing about travel has become a way of making sense of my life,
Reading about a far-off place can be a satisfaction in itself, and you might be thankful you’re reading about the bad trip without the dust in your nose and the sun burning your head, not having to en...
One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century? I'll tell you the worst one. People can't stand to be alone. Can't tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home teleph...
On that trip it was my good fortune to be wrong; being mistaken is the essence of the traveler's tale.
All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting.
Africa had been deliverance for me, a liberating embrace and an opportunity.
If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay at home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to...
Eating together is an occasion that humans have made into a peacemaking ritual;
We have bestowed on Africa just enough of the disposable junk of the modern world to create in African cities a junkyard replica of the West,
Travel has always been my way of defeating this sinking feeling, partly because travel is a form of escape, and travel itself—the elemental farewell—becomes the fugitive fantasy of a new life, travel...
Time is a factor in travel, one of the most crucial.
The British were fatalistic; it was the origin of their cynicism, but it also made them good sharers of misfortune. ‘Oh, well, mustn’t grumble!
Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse. Travel gives you glimpses of the past and the future, your own and other people’s.
Like most Hong Kongers I had met, they were complete provincials, with laughable pretensions. Was it the effect of colonialism? They were well fed and rather silly and politically naive. In some ways...
Drunk people, loud people, obvious and angry people, people stammering and stumbling, spilling drinks and scarfing small burned sausages and cheese cubes on toothpicks. They had surrendered all power...
And I began writing, to console myself in my solitude and to ease the passing of time.
Triphthong.
As Henry James had said in a letter to a do-gooding friend, Only don’t, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses—remember that every life is a special problem which is n...
Yet because curiosity implies delay, and delay is regarded as a luxury (but what’s the hurry, anyway?), we have become used to life being a series of arrivals or departures, of triumphs and failures,...
What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere if you’re not in a hurry.