Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
Reading is also a journey. It’s a process of discovery.
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
Travel works best when you’re forced to come to terms with the place you’re in.
I never stay with people and I never look people up when I travel. I depend more on just chance meetings. The advantage is that people don’t know who I am. I meet people casually and they’re not doing me a big favor because I’m going to write something.
The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
The more you write, the more you’re capable of writing.
Loneliness in travel directs you and tells you about yourself. You don’t become lonely unless you’re alone.
It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.
In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.
They say that if the Swiss had designed these mountains they’d be rather flatter.
My greatest inspiration is memory.
Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.
Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it.
When I’m writing, I like to travel alone. If you really want to find out about a place, you need to be as free as possible to be spontaneous. You also need to be lonely, because loneliness is a great teacher, too.
Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.
Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
A person who is tired of London is not necessarily tired of life; it might be that he just can’t find a parking place.