"I've always felt that travel is a serious subject whose rewards go well beyond that of entertainment and recreation. The average magazine or newspaper editor looks upon travel as a subject of trivia, as something that you engage in to relax from stress, to reinvigorate you. I've never believed that. "We all tell ourselves that...

"All share a common destiny -- the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not. As it is with the good man, so with the sinner; as it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid...

"It's much cleaner to hook up with someone in a foreign city, or even across the state line, than to have a one-night stand in your own bedroom, where you partner sees the actual you and leaves the residue of his or her existence in your life. A new environment gives you the permission to...

"It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts." --Bill Vaughan, quoted in The Sun , July 2004

"Unaccustomed to direct experience, we can come to fear it. We don't want to read a book or see a museum show until we've read the reviews so that we know what to think. We lose the confidence to perceive ourselves. We want to know the meaning of an experience before we have it. We...

"Any country which displays more than one statue of a living politician is a country which is headed for trouble." --Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules (1995)

"I'd never thought much about how Americans were viewed overseas until I came to France and I was expected to look and behave in a certain way. "You're not supposed to be smoking," my classmates would tell me. "You're from the United States." Europeans expected me to regularly wash my hands with prepackaged towelettes and...

"Success means controlling your own time. If you can gain control over 60 percent of the time in your life, you are really successful." --Rod Steiger, Esquire interview, January 2004

"For my own part, I am pleased enough with surfaces -- in fact, they seem to me to be of much importance. Such things, for example, as the grasp of a child's hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of a friend or a lover, the silk of a girl's thigh,...

"In addition to being at the heart of Mesopotamian culture, beer may even have been the foundation for the whole of Western civilization. In the 1950s Jonathan Sauer, an American botanist, suggested that the original motivation for domesticating cereal crops (and thus switching from a settled to a nomadic lifestyle) might have been to make...

"If you set off on down the road with specific agendas and goals, you will at best discover the pleasure of actualizing them. But if you wander with open eyes and simple curiosity, you'll discover a much richer pleasure -- the simple feeling of possibility that hums from every direction as you move from place...

"Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth." --Walt Whitman, "Song of the Open Road" (1856)

"Strolling through the Karen village [in Thailand], feeling voyeuristic as I glimpsed scenes of family intimacy, part of me hoped to experience something I didn't possess. My mobility was a form of decadence, and in traveling the world, something in me was seeking its antithesis. I'd come halfway around the globe to sit in a...

"Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes -- with all...

"What is an experience? Something that breaks a polite routine and for a brief period allows us to witness things with the heightened sensitivity afforded to us by novelty, danger, or beauty. To experience something is to fully open one's eyes in a way that habit prevents us from doing, and if two people open...

"I find the very image-conscious culture that we live in to be incredibly oppressive. ...It fascinates me, especially now in this media-driven age, that we're encouraged to purchase a pre-packaged experience rather than have the experience ourselves. You know, you watch the politicians debate, and, as if that wasn't phony enough, then there's a commentary...

"A traveller! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad: I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's; then, to have seen much and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor hands." --William Shakespeare, As You Like It (1599), Act 4, Scene 1 Note : David...

"One archetype that hits me very forcefully, as it does many people, is that when I'm wandering around the Himalayas, for example, most of the people that I see are Westerners from Germany, California, or the Netherlands, who are wearing sandals, Indian smocks, and are in search of enlightenment, antiquity, peace, and all the things...

"To our so-called modern way of thinking, time is money. As a result, we all have very little time. ...It's so expensive that no one can afford much of it. Yet isn't it curious that the richer you are, the less time you can spare from tending your riches? What's the catch? Catch-22? Not really,...