The only real river I knew was hardly more than a brook. It spilled through a tumbledown mill at the bottom of our road, opened into a little trouty ….

Seattle was built out on pilings over the sea, and at high tide the whole city seemed to come afloat like a ship lifting free from a mud berth and sw….

In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes..

Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose..

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

Good travel books are novels at heart..

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 ….

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….

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….

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, ….

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….

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….

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 ….

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….

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….

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….

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

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….

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