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.

Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.

The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.

I find nothing more depressing than optimism.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

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