The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.
If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveller learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and it’s fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment.
Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.
A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.
Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.
I find nothing more depressing than optimism.
If I didn’t have writing, I’d be running down the street hurling grenades in people’s faces.
Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.
Most people who seek attention and regard by announcing that they’re writing a novel are actually so devoid of narrative talent that they can’t hold the attention of a dinner table for thirty seconds, even with a dirty joke.
Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.
Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.