"I came to realize that I traveled best when I traveled no faster than a dog could trot." --Gardner McKay, Journey Without a Map (2009)

"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 Caribbean holiday is a mass-marketed product as well as a place. Like a tin of fruit cocktail, the promise of a holiday experience has been manufactured out of the material and ideological resources available to contemporary culture. The "destination," as they say in the business, is an integral part of the identity of the...

"A good travel writer can give you the warp and weft of everyday life, the generalities of people's existence that are rarely reflected in journalism, and hardly touched on by any other discipline. Despite the internet and the revolution in communications, there is still no substitute." --Colin Thubron, quoted in " Home truths on abroad...

"Traveling makes one modest -- you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world." --Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt (1849)

"All you need to know about American society can be gleaned from an anthropology of its driving behavior. That behavior tells you much more than you could ever learn from its political ideas. Drive ten thousand miles across America and you will know more about the country than all the institutes of sociology and political...

"Tedious journeys are apt to make companions irritable one to another; but under hard circumstances, a traveler does his duty best who doubles his kindliness of manner to those about him, and takes harsh words gently, and without retort. He should make it a point of duty to do so. It is at those times...

"Some travelers have always needed to set themselves apart from others -- from tourists. And almost as soon as the word tourist appeared at the start of the nineteenth century, it began to carry derogatory overtones, but the democratization of travel has charged the word with greater irritation and scorn. As more and more tourists...

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)

"Abandon your mobile phone, laptop, iPod, and all such links to family, friends, and work colleagues. Concentrate on where you are and derive your entertainment from immediate stimuli, the tangible world around you. Increasingly, in hostels and guesthouses one sees "independent" travelers eagerly settling down in front of computers instead of conversing with fellow travelers,...

"One of the cul-de-sacs that a travel writer has to continually watch out for is the pervasive assumption that poor people are intrinsically nicer than rich ones. It looks silly in print but on the ground, in the dust, it's more seductive. A fond belief that poverty is synonymous with dignity, that kindness, politeness and...

"Homesickness is a feeling that many know and suffer from; I on the other hand feel a pain less known, and its name is "Outsickness." When the snow melts, the stork arrives, and the first steamships race off, then I feel the painful travel unrest." --Hans Christian Andersen, 1856 letter, quoted in Jens Andersen's 2005...

"I've been to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It's a tower, and it's leaning. You look at it, but nothing happens, so then you look for someplace to have a sandwich." --Danny DeVito, " What I've Learned ," Esquire , Jan. 2011

"To this day, across the developing world, foreigners sacrifice their lives and energies, often heroically, in order to help the locals attain a better life. Yet frequently in the process they try to protect the places they visit from the very technology, freedom of movement, and material plenty that they have enjoyed in getting there....

"A healthy culture is like a healthy person: it is constantly changing, growing, and evolving, yet something persists through these changes, a ballast that keeps it upright and recognizable no matter how much it is buffeted by the transformative winds of trade. We can even expand the analogy a bit, and think of a culture...

"In the best travel, disconnection is a necessity. Concentrate on where you are; do no back-home business; take no assignments; remain incommunicado; be scarce. It is a good thing that people don't know where you are or how to find you. Keep in mind the country you are in. That's the theory." --Paul Theroux, Ghost...

"Just look what gets written about Afghanistan. In an age when journalism is becoming more and more etiolated, when articles are becoming shorter and shorter, usually lacking all historical context, travel writing is one of the few venues to write with some complexity about an alien culture. An Obama speech, a foreign policy paper or...

"We tend to use the word "real" to differentiate what tourists see in a modern-day city or place, versus what the locals, who have a much deeper and intimate familiarity with its nuanced culture and details, know or experience. Few New Yorkers flock to Times Square for dinner on a Saturday night, just as few...

"One of the most important reasons to travel is to know what it feels like to be a foreigner." --A.A. Gill, AA Gill is Away (2003)

"In the long history of modern tourism one element is striking. The main tourist attraction tends to be those other tourists. We devote a lot of time and energy to observing and commenting on fellow travelers. At the beach or the café on the piazza we turn into amateur vacation sociologists. In the evening we...