Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us. "

Related Quotes:

" I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble. "

" The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity. "

" My greatest inspiration is memory. "

" It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources. "

" If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think. "

" 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. "

" Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing. "

" I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler. "

" To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. "

" You need to be on your own so that you can meet people as you are, and as they are. "

" Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation. "

" What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one's whole life. "

" I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about. "

" Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in. "

" The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business, but it's the only thing they've been allowed to do. "

" I don't look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren't there, there would be no economy. So I understand why a tourist economy is necessary. "

" People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it. "

" The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth. "

" Africa is really a place for the wealthy traveler. It's got some nice hotels, but they're very expensive hotels. It doesn't really cater to the backpacker or to the overland traveler. "

" Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent. "

" I wanted the Peace Corps to be something very vague and unorganized, and to a large extent it was. It did not run smoothly. The consequence was that we were left alone. "

" I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely. "

" Dentists seem to me very orderly, businesslike people who appear to become somewhat bored with the routine of their work after a period of time. Perhaps I'm wrong. "

" An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed. "

" The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming. "

" The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that equals the Yangtze River, that equals the Nile. We have the greatest cities in the world - among the greatest cities in the world. "

" I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels. "

" There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go. "

" Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine. "

" 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. "