An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.
Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters; success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure.
You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace.
Airplanes have dulled and desensitized us; we are encumbered, like lovers in a suit of armor.
There’s always a way if you’re not in a hurry.
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.
Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.
Tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash – suspicious, unbelieving, and incurious.
A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them – jobs, money, pride.
Pain does not create a long-lasting memory, but the memory of luxury exerts itself for ever.
I’m not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there’s still a great green heart where there’s possibility. There’s hope in the wilderness.
Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.
Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.
The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing.
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.
The long morning shadows lay as still and dark as lakes and patterned the rough ground with straight margins.
A French traveler with a sore throat is a wonderful thing to behold, but it takes more than tonsillitis to prevent a Frenchman from boasting.
There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It’s like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster.