The [travel] writer, looking back at the journey from a distance of a year or two (or three), is a different character from the hapless character who….

If we live inside a bad joke, it is up to us to learn, at best and worst, to tell it well..

Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilso….

Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything ….

The mythical America?that marvellous, heroic, sentimental landwas an object of faith. It challenged you to make the believer's leap over the rude fac….

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, ….

Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony..

In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air..

When traveling, I usually keep a notebook: when home at my desk, the notebook serves mainly to remind me how little I saw at the time, or rather how ….

One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have ….

At night, what you see is a city, because all you see is lights. By day, it doesn't look like a city at all. The trees out-number the houses. And tha….

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists i….

We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citize….

It always seems to me odd to call a place a wilderness when every wilderness area in the US bristles with rules and regulations as to how you can beh….

Travel. It was an intransitive verb. It didn't involve any destinations. It was going to the going's sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with mo….

Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen..

One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has ju….

Seattle is a liberal city, its politics not so much blue in the American, not the British, sense as deep ultramarine, and its manners are studiously ….

Good travel books are novels at heart..

I've taught the better class of tourist both to see and not to see; to lift their eyes above and beyond the inessentials, and thrill to our western N….

In the city one clings to nostalgic and unreal signs of community, takes forced refuge in codes, badges and coteries; the city's life, of surfaces an….