Travel. It was an intransitive verb. It didn't involve any destinations. It was going to the going's sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with motion itself as the only object.

In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air.

Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted.

Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the list more or less stops there.

Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen.

One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set it. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.

I ain't sleeping. I'm just taking a good look at the insides of my eyelids.