"Foreignness is an intoxicant. As when we're drunk, we don't know how much it's our true selves coming out and how much it's the drink speaking through us." --Pico Iyer, in Michael Shapiro's A Sense of Place (2004)

"It's easy to forget that travel is a privilege enjoyed by the citizens of the world's richest nations. Per capita, the Swiss make the most international trips, followed by the Dutch, the English, the Canadians, and the Germans (Americans place tenth). Large swaths of humanity -- Israelis and Palestinians; Thai women and Caribbean men; North...

"Good travel writing is done by good writers who travel. It is not enough to have swum through piranha-infested waters to the source of the Amazon. You must be able to write well to convey that experience. When you have learned the craft of writing, you can make a stroll through your own suburban neighborhood...

"Traveling on a shoestring was a good training for almost everything -- the cheaper the hotel I stay in, the better the stories that come out of it. And I think that's almost an unfailing law." --Pico Iyer, in Michael Shapiro's A Sense of Place (2004)

"Death twitches my ear. 'Live,' he says. 'I am coming.'" --Virgil, Roman poet, c. 70 - 19 BC

"Bohemian primitivism is [mainly] in the mind. The community yearned for is symbolic, not actual. Its undivided organic wholeness is something imagined rather than observed. The unique aesthetic sensibilities remote communities embody are hypothesised -- deduced from pretty textiles or attractive pots. And even if one takes the trouble to visit such places, one is...

From Alan Lightman's Einstein

Since the New York Times just wrapped up its epic series on class in America , I thought I'd share this travel-related outtake from Paul Fussell's snarky 1983 book, Class : "The middle is the class that makes cruise ships a profitable enterprise, for it fancies that the upper-middle class is to be mixed with...

IT ONLY STARTS by Melody Davis The American road is our art, pure process of leaving. Driving doesn't end. It only starts as the radio feeds a secret part of the brain that's always running the American road. Our art has no destination, though it departs, and the eyes, never full, keep filling. Driving doesn't...

"Everywhere you go, the sky is the same color." --Persian saying

The following passage is from David Brook's 2000 book Bobos in Paradise . It makes an interesting comparison to Paul Fussell's rant about "anti-tourists" in his 1980 book Abroad . [ Note : A "Bobo", as Brooks defines it, is short for "bourgeois bohemian" -- a member of the corporate upper-middle class whose values blend...

"[As] a Western country becomes richer, its people overall do not become happier. The reason for this is that over time our standards and expectations rise to meet our income. A Gallup poll has asked Americans each year: "What is the smallest amount of money a family of four needs to get along in this...

"I was simply restless, quite likely because of a dissatisfaction with the recent trajectory of my life, and if there is a better, more compelling reason for dropping everything and moving to the end of the world, I don't know what is." --J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals (2004) Note : J. Maarten...

"We all paint the people we've never met and the places we've never seen in broad strokes, based on what we've read or heard or seen on TV. Of course, we make such judgments at our peril, but hoary cliches persist and survive because we find them useful. Often, when we want to know how...

"Though many landscapes are increasingly sullied, that need not spell the decline of travel writing. It does mean that travel writing must confront the real world, slums and all, rather than escape into an airbrushed version of a more rustic past." --Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth (1996)

Lonely Planet Travel Writing author Don George was intereviewed by World Hum this week. Here's my favorite outtake: "When I first realized that I could make a living as a travel writer, one of the things that most appealed to me was that travel writers are in a way the last great generalists. You can...

"The most vivid travel experiences usually find you by accident, and the qualities that will make you fall in love with a place are rarely the features that took you there." --Rolf Potts, Vagabonding (2003)

"It is now a commonplace to say that there are no more remote corners of the globe

"We ate dinner at Madame Lecomte's restaurant on the far side of the island. It was crowded with Americans and we had to stand up and wait for a place. Some one had put it in the American Women's Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans, so...

"I went back and forth between Cuba and the United States a lot at the end of the '80s, when very few people were doing, and I always felt that one good thing I could take to Cuba was a human, balanced sense of what America was like. And one good thing I could bring...