"Human beings are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere, yet I encourage travel to as many destinations as possible for the sake of education as well as pleasure." --Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993)

"What we learn of the world is never simply a result of how often or how far we travel. It is just as intimately related to how sincerely we receive strangers amongst us." --Erve Chambers, "Can the Anthropology of Tourism Make us Better Travelers?", NAPA Bulletin 23 (2005)

"The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace. As Huck put it, lighting out for the territory. --Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari (2003)

"Routines and habits are the Known, protecting us from the Unknown. Habits are also called home. Habits tame the raw wilderness of existence into the civilized comforts of everyday life. Unfortunately, as we all know, habits gradually domesticate all the wildness and energy out of life. So much energy gets bound up in routines and...

"A journey can help us write better because it has helped us understand something more of life; someone visits India, for instance, and on returning home will write better, say, his memories of his first day at school." --Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris (2003)

"If you're going to a place where there are going to be guns, it really does help to know what everybody is mad about. Do a lot of reading. Find out who's who and what's what so that if you happen to be in the hands of somebody who may have reason not to like...

"Not knowing where you're going, you pay more attention to where you are, wherever that is." --Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in the USA (1980)

"If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one." --Albert Camus, quoted in The Sun , July 2004

"The word travel is the same as the French travail . It means hard work, penance and finally a journey. There was an idea, particularly in the Middle Ages, that by going on pilgrimage, as Muslim pilgrims do, you were reinstating the original condition of man. The act of walking through a wilderness was thought...

"Your time off is a measure of the quality of your life. Setting yourself the goal of more personal freedom is as valid as -- and ultimately more practical than -- a goal of financial riches and material abundance. Today, our society provides more opportunities than ever before for survival with style, for living well...

"It may sound blazingly obvious, but the best preparation for a career in travel writing is travel. Take a year off and travel round the world." --Stanley Stewart, in Don George's, Travel Writing (2005)

"If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect. ...Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life." --Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari (2003)

"There is no experience but your own. Let go the crutch of living through someone else's experience, of being guided and led. You are your own expert. The only travels I'm an expert on are my own, which may have little to do with yours. I can't be your expert, only your advisor; and I...

"Money is the wealth of the materialist, and works miracles in the realm of the physical. Time is the wealth of the pilgrim, and works miracles in all realms." --Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in the USA (1980)

"There is no poetry where there are no mistakes." --Joy Harjo, quoted in The Sun , May 2004

"It is the dilemma that every traveler faces -- especially every traveler who wants to tell his friends about the Hidden Paradise he's discovered: the very fact of giving a name -- or a face -- to the place you love changes it till it becomes a place you hardly like. Talk about how unspoiled...

"There's nothing necessarily wrong about being a tourist. A tourist is somebody who happens to be more interested in the rest of the world than he is in his own little puddle." --Bruce Chatwin, interview with Michael Ignatieff in Granta 21 , Spring 1987

"No one can give you the magic bullet that, once fired, will make you a writer. Writing is like anything else: the more you do it, the better you get at it." --Tim Cahill, in Don George's, Travel Writing (2005)

"According to an article in The New Yorker , in the typical human sex act, the act that brought each of us to this planet, there are between 60 million and 900 million individual sperm involved. So each of us on a cellular level, I think, has a memory, a clear sense that we have...

"If you travel, you escape being labeled with class stereotypes. I come from a very middle-class family of lawyers and architects. Travel was an immense relief -- it got rid of the pressure from above and from below. If you're out on the road, people have to take you at face value." --Bruce Chatwin, interview...