"Novelty rejuvenates like gulps from the Fountain of Youth. To stay young, we need its tonic in regular doses." --Jeffrey Tayler, River of No Reprieve (2006)

"[T]ravel for me is a kind of writing, an alternate text, a preliminary draft. It isn't just a way to escape, as Graham Greene put it, or a way to gather material or battle against boredom. It is an act of creativity in which the world is an empty page and I'm the pen scrawling...

"Journalism desperately needs a return to terrain, to the kind of firsthand, solitary discovery of local knowledge best associated with old-fashioned travel writing. Travel writing is more important than ever as a means to reveal the vivid reality of places that get lost in the elevator music of 24-hour media reports. In and of itself,...

"Travel for me is not really about going from A to C via B, but getting lost in G, or finding out that you wished you'd gone via P, or realizing that you wish you'd been in T all along. When the great Islamic traveler Ibn Battuta left his hometown of Tangier for Mecca to...

"The great thing about travel is that you get to meet the kind of people you might otherwise cross the street to avoid." --Tony Horwitz, in remarks at the Key West Literary Seminar, January 7th, 2006.

"Art is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave. In the world's broad field of battle, In the bivouac of life, Be not like dumb, driven cattle! Be a hero in the strife! Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant! Let...

"You see, for a certain kind of Audi-driving, Nobu-dining, Loro Piana-wearing person, a vacation destination is not just a simple matter of preference, but more a critical lifestyle choice. Exactly where this individual chooses to spend a quick-fix city break or a long, languid summer is crucial to him because, he believes, the exclusivity of...

"An underappreciated benefit of travel is jet lag, which administers educational doses of melancholy, regret, night-wandering, and nostalgia; and then, when it lifts, the ardent visitor appreciates life in his or her home place or designated destination with the fresh eyes of recovery." --Herbert Gold, in the introduction to The Best Travel Writing 2006

"It is easy to become annoyed at the number of hawkers trying to sell us goods and services in many of the places we visit, and to become equally annoyed at what seems to be an overly tolerant attitude toward such practices on the part of local municipalities and tourist establishments. Once again, we often...

"People don't want to change unless forced to. We've been conditioned to structure and control our lives in order to resist change, to stop change altogether if possible, to be secure, to make rules, to make plans, to organize, to enforce, and so forth. The problem with all this is that it doesn't work anymore....

"Classist distinctions are conventionally made between travel and tourism. Popular wisdom has is that educated middle-class travelers, more aristocratic and superior, pursue the distant and unexpected, gaining insights as they ply their graceful and god-given way across others' terrains; while common tourists, traveling in bulk on packaged tours, just gawk, go too fast to see,...

"If anyone deserves a public service award for peeling back the curtain on distant societies, it is less the publishers of major newspapers and magazines than those of the Lonely Planet Guides and The Rough Guides. These two series combine historical and cultural depth with intrepid, solitary research by young travelers who get to every...

"While lamenting the passage of heroic explorers, [Paul] Fussell also decries what he imagines to be the homogenization of the world, the way in which whole cities and previously remote regions have become interchangeable and safe for Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis. He argues that airport design has become a "ubiquitous international idiom."...

""When I first lived in China, I was mostly struck by the differences, but over time the similarities became more obvious. Americans and Chinese shared a number of characteristics: they were pragmatic and informal, and they had an easy sense of humor. In both nations, people tended to be optimistic, sometimes to a fault. They...

"The best travel writing prepares you for what a place is really like, and consequently gives the reader who will never travel there an accurate ground-level portrait of it. Colin Thubron’s In Siberia (1999) provides a much more vibrant picture of the dissolution of rural Russia after the collapse of communism and the advent of...

"You know, the Germans say you have a 'fingertip feel' -- Fingerspitzengefuhl -- the sense of a place, you know how a place smells, how it feels. A strategist who doesn't have that innate sense about the area he's working on is going to get us in trouble. The U.S. government doesn't have enough people...

"We are not who we think we are when we are elsewhere. We can even become another person entirely. Who will ever know? Traveling can be a kind of performance piece. We can tell our airplane seatmate or one-night stand almost anything. We can reinvent ourselves instead of our surroundings. We can surprise ourselves as...

"In some ways, I think travel is about learning how to see, learning how to pay attention. It's an alarm clock in some ways, and it's a jumpstart to putting our senses on the setting where they're universally receptive. I think theoretically we could do that at our homes, and yet somehow, surrounded by familiarity...

"Realizing that you will die greatly clarifies your vision of life, and stimulates opportunities for making the vision real. To take anything for granted is to de-energize it. If you can't feel your own miraculousness, you are missing the quintessential experience of life." --Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in the USA (1980)

"To my mind, there is no greater gap in the anthropological study of tourism than the one that exists in our reluctance to study hospitality as an important and dynamic partner to travel. We have allowed ourselves to imagine that the commercialization of much of the tourism industry has replaced culturally based conventions of hospitality,...