In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.

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

A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler. Nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness.

The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

The traveler's boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience - shocking though it may seem at the time - is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.

The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that equals the Yangtze River, that equals the Nile. We have the greatest cities in the world - among the greatest cities in the world. We have a large population. We have challenges. We have an indigenous population.