Occupation: Film Writer Birth: April 10, 1941
Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't k….
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect..
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….
I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in my opinion. This version of masculinity is a little like havi….
Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening..
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..
It's not fashionable but I like to spit out of the window of a moving train..
... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home..
Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you….
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 th….
All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the i….
If people are driving you around to look at animals, that's wonderful. That's educational, but it's not necessarily enlightening and you're not findi….
Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion..
Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine..
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..
Tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash--suspicious, unbelieving, and incurious..
The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning..
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..
When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now….
... Oceanic malaise. I never saw anyone reading anything more demanding than a comic book. I never heard any youth express an interest in science or ….
The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming..