Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.

If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.

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

If the guidebook used to be critical, today it seems largely a celebratory adjunct to the publicity operations of hotels, resorts, and even countries.

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.

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

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.