Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.

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

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

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.The explorer seeks theundiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history,the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity.If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates.

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

If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.

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