Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.

What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry.

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.

A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about having a very bad time, having a miserable time, even better. You don't want to read a book about someone having a great time in the South of France, eating and drinking and falling in love. What you want to read is a book about a guy going through the jungle, going through the arctic snow, having a terrible time trying to cross the Sahara, and solving problems as they go.

I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.