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

Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.

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

A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.

I find nothing more depressing than optimism.

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

Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.