"Movies are used by cultures where they are foreign films in a much more primitive way than in their own; they may be enjoyed as travelogues or as initiations into how others live or in ways we might not even guess. The sophisticated and knowledge able moviegoer is likely to forget how new and how...

"For the personal, subjective nature of [travel] literature has always been one of its chief and most endearing elements, no matter how often some readers and critics through the ages have tried to eliminate it from all travel accounts as undesirable, or have failed to find it except in those published after the supposed rise...

"Traveling in Siberia a decade ago, I thought I was pretty much beyond the reach of checkability; in fact-checker shorthand, anything I wrote would be “O.A.,” which stands for “on author,” meaning “unverifiable by anything other than the author’s say-so.” I did not need to worry that any checker would visit where I had been,...

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World This quote stopped me in my tracks this week. I’m a lover of Huxley’s works and of course Brave New World is a classic. I’m...

"The first thing you do when you arrive in a strange city and want to get lost is put your bags away. Getting lost involves -- requires -- intense wandering, and a suitcase or heavy backpack is only going to slow you down and make you long for a hotel, a shower, and a change...

"Day after day, perhaps week after week and month after month, your foot is in the stirrup. To taste the cold breath of the earliest morn, and to lead, or follow, your bright cavalcade till sunset through forests and mountain passes, through valleys and desolate plains, all this becomes your mode of life, and you...

"The commonality and familiarity of travel may also be seen in the fact that travel is the most common source of metaphors used to explicate transformations and transitions of all sorts, we draw upon the experience of human mobility to define the meaning of death (as a "passing") and the structure of life (as a...

"Travel -- especially by people who rarely do it -- is often dismissed as a luxury and an indulgence, not a practical or useful way to spend one's time. People complain, "I wish I could afford to go away." Even when I did the math and showed that I often spent less money while on...

"Everything science gives us immediately becomes normative. To an eighty-year-old man, a computer is this amazing device that creates instantaneous access to limitless information. He can’t get his head around it. But to a twenty-year-old man, the computer is a limited machine that costs too much and always needs to be faster. Because human live...

"First, goals for travel should be both generally related to abstract life goals — like becoming a better person, not accumulating stamps in a passport — but those abstract goals need to be broken into concrete steps to make them easier to accomplish. …Similarly, vacations are more effective if you use them to seek “desired...

"Prejudice is not a European monopoly. My travel writing, for instance, in Pakistan and Afghanistan is really shaped by my childhood memory, common among small-town lower-middle-class Brahmins, of Muslims as threatening to "others" -- and there are moments when I lapse into these inherited fears. I can't write about China without discussing our nation's image...

"The act of writing organizes how I spend my time when I arrive in a place. It gives me information, concentrates my thoughts, and opens doors I wouldn't otherwise be allowed to knock on." --William Zinsser, “The Road to Timbuktu: Why I Travel,” American Scholar , Winter 1997

"The same details that make foreign travel so confusing -- Do I tip the waiter? Where is this train taking me? -- turn out to have a lasting impact, making us more creative because we're less insular. We're reminded of all that we don't know, which is nearly everything; we're surprised by the constant stream...

"In medieval times, when life was so narrowly circumscribed, religious pilgrimage was pretty much the only excuse a claustrophobic peasant had to leave his or her stupid little village, so a pilgrimage was an exercise in novelty and adventure under the banner of obligation; now, so many of us feel so surfeited with choice, the...

"[Percy] Fawcett was taught not just how to survey but how to see -- to record and classify everything around him, in what the Greeks called an autopsis . There were two principal manuals to help him. One was Art of Travel , written by Francis Galton for a general audience. The other was Hints...

"The travel writer does not merely purvey information; that is for the Karl Baedekers, the sober compilers of guidebooks. His role is to be the tourist's perfect companion: to be articulate, well informed, a skilled raconteur; to include in what he tells a fair share of the unusual with a dash of the exotic; to...

"A life spent in transit like this is bound up with equal degrees of hope and fear. On the one hand, artists are now given the possibility of evading the pressure of prevailing local tastes in a relatively painless way. Thanks to modern means of communication they can seek out like-minded associates from all over...

"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...

"Even the most culturally saturated place retains a factor of wildness, that is, of the radically amorphous and unaccounted for, something that is not so much immune to culture as alien to it in its very midst, disparate from it from within. We sense this wildness explicitly in moments of absurdity -- and of "surdity,"...

"I do not want to know where this journey ends. Otherwise, why call this action 'journey'?" -- Matsuo Bash? , in his journal