"Travel, its very motion, ought to suggest hope. Despair is the armchair; it is indifference and glazed, incurious eyes. I think travelers are essentially optimist, or else they would never go anywhere." --Paul Theroux, Fresh Air Fiend (2000)

"There is a sniffy school of thought that promotes the idea that the age of travel is over, and that in 1946 when Evelyn Waugh published the juiciest selections from his travel books under the title When the Going Was Good , it was to be assumed that the going wasn't good anymore. The book...

Some writer once said; “There are only two stories: man goes on a journey; or stranger comes to town.” Some other writer said; “Those are the same story.” The quotes above have been attributed to writers as diverse as Dostoevsky and John Gardner. Despite their flippancy, there’s an undeniable verisimilitude there – a sense that...

"A person who has not crossed an African border on foot has not really entered the country, for the airport in the capital is no more than a confidence trick; the distant border, what appears to be the edge, is the country's central reality." --Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown (2003)

"Impatient people…find that travel is slow and full of nuisance and delay -- that there's no instant gratification. Or that there's only one bus or train a week and you might get stuck. They haven't got the patience for it but that's what travel teaches you. Temperamentally, people are less suited to travel than ever...

"Reading and restlessness -- dissatisfaction at home, a sourness at being indoors, and a notion that the real world was elsewhere -- made me a traveler. If the Internet was everything it was cracked up to be, we would all stay home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available,...

I have a serious question this week. It centers around our motivations for travel. I’ve been asking this question a lot lately and am really intently listening for answers. Why do you travel? No really, not the surface, “I need a break, I wanna see something different,” answers. WHY do you travel? What does it...

"1,000 people died in a rural village in Ivory Coast; this was a small news item in the western press, though when one person is injured in Jerusalem it’s on the front page as an outrage. I’d like to know why this is so. The fact that there are far fewer foreign correspondents makes the...

"I was recently in Kenya, in the Masai-Mara game reserve in southwestern Kenya, and every so often saw a Masai moran, or warrior, with a cell phone in one hand and a spear in the other. Rickshaw wallahs in India carry cell phones, and there is electronic media available in the unlikeliest places. While I...

"People say that because of Google Earth and the 'net, travel is less of a priority. I would say the opposite is the case. The very fact of easy interconnection, and the illusion such contact creates of understanding, makes travel ever more necessary. The world is not what it seems. The peevish person in his...

1. Leave home 2. Go alone 3. Travel light 4. Bring a map 5. Go by land 6. Walk across a national frontier 7. Keep a journal 8. Read a novel that has no relation to the place you’re in 9. If you must bring a cell phone, avoid using it 10. Make a friend...

"The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a journey. "This is what I saw" -- news from the wider world; the odd, the strange, the shocking, tales of beasts or of other people. "They're just...

"The world is not as small as Google Earth depicts it. I think of the Lower River district in Malawi, the hinterland of Angola, the unwritten-about north of Burma and its border with Nagaland. Nearer home, the urban areas of Europe and the United States. I do not know of a book that recounts the...

"Travel is a transition, and at its best is a journey that begins with setting forth from home. I hated parachuting in to a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease with which a person could be...

"Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as...

"When a person says, in a foreign place, "I feel right at home here," he is making a statement about the nature of travel, not in the texture of the place he's in. ...I don't belittle this sort of travel, which I regard as Traveling As A Version Of Being At Home; but it is...

"'Don't go there,' the know-it-all, stay-at-home finger-wagger says of many a distant place. I have heard it my whole traveling life, and in almost every case it was bad advice. In my experience these maligned countries are often the most fulfilling. I am not saying they are fun. For undiluted jollification you bake in the...

"Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life." --Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008)

"The whole point of traveling is to arrive alone, like a specter, in a strange country at nightfall, not in the brightly lit capital but by the back door, in the wooded countryside, hundreds of miles from the metropolis, where, typically, people don't see many strangers and were hospitable and do not instantly think of...

The best of travel seems to exist outside of time, as though the years of travel are not deducted from your life. --Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008)