Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" People who don't read books a lot are threatened by books. "

Related Quotes:

" Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. "

" One of the things the 'Tao of Travel' shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them. "

" If you look at a map, you see that Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. It's 17 hours of straight flying from London. It's very far away, and sometimes you feel as if you're on another planet. But I like that. Also, that's ideal for writing. "

" My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it. "

" A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about having a very bad time; having a miserable time, even better. "

" You can't separate the people from the places - although I sometimes like traveling in places where there are no people. "

" 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. "

" When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost. "

" The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness. "

" When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books. "

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

" Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me. "

" I am happy being what I am. "

" The idea of traveling in Africa for me is based on going by road or train or bus or whatever and crossing borders. You can't travel easily or at all through some countries. "

" I've never spent a whole year in one place without leaving. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Travel is glamorous only in retrospect. "

" What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself. "

" You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend. "

" Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial. "

" When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it. "

" A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing. "

" There are two worlds: the world of the tourist and the world of everyone else. Often they're side by side. But the tourist doesn't actually see how people live. "

" The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given. "

" I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read. "

" 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 cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better. "

" My record was so bad that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troublemaker and was accepted as a volunteer only after a great deal of explaining and arguing. "