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 it.

Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of...

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better

…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 its purpose…

You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back

The train passed fruit farms and clean villages and Swiss cycling in kerchiefs, calendar scenes that you admire for a moment before feeling an urge to move on to a new month

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 carpeted...

The drug tour he had hoped would be unique, his own, … was apparently a widely known trip down a well-traveled path, in the sort of full-color brochure that also described gorilla encounters in Africa...

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...

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy – how sad that I could not reinvent the...

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.

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.

I had cooperated. I could not have refused. I was smitten with her, half in love but also afraid, because in my life (and she seemed to know this) I had not loved anyone without...

It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians

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...

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume

I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I’d like to identify who it is. After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I...

and the mocking realization that money was just colorful crumpled paper, hardly different from a candy wrapper, the market itself little more than a casino.

The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate’s career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.

And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric...

Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence,

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.

The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures — I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real...

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

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.

Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.

The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a...

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”...

I said I didn’t think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes – better than the...

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation; and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind

Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.

Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.

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.

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation– experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way

The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On...

Riding the Iron Rooster.

..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 its purpose,...

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.

He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.

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.

The kind of travel I do is a reaction to that. Instead of going to meet gorillas or Bhutan, I prefer to go [my own way] and do things the wealthy wouldn’t dare to do.

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. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible...

…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.

A slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window and disappears and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves.

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...