Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.

A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.

To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.

I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.

And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.

I find nothing more depressing than optimism.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.