Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away.
But art should require no instrument but memory.
The disorder in Yashar’s apartment was that comfortable littering and stacking that only another writer can recognize as order – the considered scatter of papers and books a writer builds around himself until it acquires the cozy solidity of a nest.
That was my Malawian epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. All the others, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.
The saddest task for the ironist is having to tell the listener that it’s a joke, because of course it is never a joke.
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.
My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.
I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.
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 friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown...
The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson’s on the main drag into maturity.
You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back.
Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life.
Tibet has a very proud people but it’s culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It’s like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it’s gone.
Reading liberates you. You could know about the world through reading.
Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
You can’t save the rhinos and you can’t preserve a culture. I’m very pessimistic. Once it’s gone, it’s over.