"Travel writing is perishable. I find that when I'm reading a book of bygone travels I become irritated with curiosity about what the place is like today -- can you still swim in the river, as the writer did? Can you still eat the fish? Are the houses still roofed with thatch? This problem has...

"A big part of growing up, for everyone, involves exploring what it is that makes us feel not only alive and present, but also competent and respected. With luck, we find passions that are legal and worthwhile, and may be spun upward into hobbies and vocations, rather than downward into self-destruction. These don't have to...

"The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting...

"To me, a sense of place is nothing more than a sense of people. Whether a landscape is bleak or beautiful, it doesn't mean anything to me until a person walks into it, and then what interests me is how the person behaves in that place." --Mark Salzman, in They Went: The Art and Craft...

"To see the travel writing of 19th and 20th century Europeans as uniquely prejudiced and uniquely politicized, exclusively open to formulating "discourses of difference" or contributing in some unique way to the politics of colonial expansion, seems to be to be historically naïve and clearly factually wrong: Abdul Latif Shustari and Fanny Parkes were direct...

"The structure of the tourist experience involves a paradoxical relation at once to the cultural and ontological Other and to others of the same (tourist) culture. It is tourism itself that destroys (in the very process by which it constructs) the authenticity of the tourist object: and every tourist thus at some level denies belonging...

Beside travel, another source of reportage is other people, those encountered on the road, and those we travel to meet in order to get them to convey their knowledge, tales and opinions to us. Here Herodotus turns out to be the master extraordinaire. Judging by what he writes, whom he meets and the way he...

"By talking our city's physical geography and overlaying it with psychogeography -- a technique of mapping the psychic and emotional flows of a city instead of its rational street grids -- we become more sensitive to our surroundings. [As Guy Debord says in his "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography": "The sudden change of...

"I think when you show genuine curiosity, and when you’re confident enough to walk alone with a smile on your face, people think, he really wants to be here. And you ask a question, and all of a sudden you’re getting invited in for tea and food. If you’re polite and show due respect, I...

"Modern education ignores the need for solitude: hence a decline in religion, in poetry, in all the deeper affections of the spirit: a disease to be doing something always, as if one could never sit quietly and let the puppet show unroll itself before one: an inability to lose oneself in mystery and wonder while,...

"When you drive on the Great Plains, sometimes it's hard to understand why the land is so empty, why the small towns are dying, why you get so bored. And it's hard to write about the boredom without being boring. The boredom is important, however: I don't believe you know a place until you've been...

"Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life." --Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008)

"The freedom of being a stranger in a strange place, knowing no one, needing to know no one, with no obligations, elicits deep feelings of liberation. The farther from the beaten path I go, the quicker my attachment to any idea of how I should be treated is discarded -- I'm grateful merely that my...

"So it's plain to see what responsibility lies with our work, reportage. Plying our trade, we are not just men or women of writing pursuits, but also some kind of missionaries, translators and messengers. We do not translate from one text into another, but from one culture into another in order to make them mutually...

"We all know that it's possible to drive from here to California and stay at more or less the same motel the entire way, in a landscape where certain elements never change. This might have been an interesting experience thirty years ago when it was still new. It might be an interesting experience is you...

"We board our jumbo jets precisely to find a world where there are no jumbo jets. We pass through security to get to a land where there is no more need to do so. We look for Elysium in distant lands where there are no hamburger stands and satellite dishes and telephones -- and yet...

"When you travel, A new silence Goes with you, And if you listen, You will hear What your heart would Love to say." --John O'Donohue, " For the Traveler " (2008)

"Part of what interested me so much about pilgrimage as a concept—what made me think it might work as a structure to hang a bunch of other stuff (questions of restlessness and purpose and forgiveness) on—was that, the more I read and talked and thought about it, the more capacious the idea seemed: Pretty much...

"Tourists, I could now better understand, were not some lesser species. Like all travelers, they had earned their right to travel as they wished, and if that meant organized tours and checklist sightseeing, who was I to tell them they were wrong? Travel did not always have to be hard or deep. It could even...

"Many of the greatest travel books of the late 20th century were about epic journeys, often by young men, conveying the raw intoxication of travel during a moment in life when time is endless, and deadlines and commitments are non-existent; when experience is all you hope to achieve and when the world is laid out...