Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.
In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.
A person who is tired of London is not necessarily tired of life; it might be that he just can’t find a parking place.
Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.
Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't.
The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It's a passion. And I can't understand people who don't want to travel.
Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.
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.
Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.
A foreign swear-word is practically inoffensive except to the person who has learnt it early in life and knows its social limits.
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.
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace.
Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.
I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster.
Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.
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.
Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life
Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.
A French traveler with a sore throat is a wonderful thing to behold, but it takes more than tonsillitis to prevent a Frenchman from boasting.
The Colombians are good-tempered people. They are used to waiting for buses that are late, used to riding buses and trains that do not arrive.
My father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn't know what he did. But my kids were privy to the ups and downs of a writer's life.
For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.
The place that interests me most, actually, is the United States. I've realized that I haven't traveled much in the States. There's a lot to see.
Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence.
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.
Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way
I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don't want to relax. I want to see something.
I feel as if my mission is to write, to see, to observe, and I feel lazy if I'm not reaching conclusions. I feel stupid. I feel as if I'm wasting my time.
Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer-a mediocre poet.
Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.
It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.
Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.
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.
There are two worlds: the world of the tourist and the world of everyone else. Often they're side by side. But the tourist doesn't actually see how people live.
Sometimes people read a book in order to not go on a trip. You read a book instead of going on the trip. And so the travel writer is doing the traveling for you.
The monotony of staying in one place is the best thing for writing a novel. Having regular habits, a kind of security, but especially no big surprises, no shocks.
No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.
Dentists seem to me very orderly, businesslike people who appear to become somewhat bored with the routine of their work after a period of time. Perhaps I'm wrong.
When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost.
Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.
I should start by saying that traveling in the States is a bit like traveling in Asia. You need it, it helps to have an introduction - that there is a certain network.
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.
I wanted the Peace Corps to be something very vague and unorganized, and to a large extent it was. It did not run smoothly. The consequence was that we were left alone.
I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.