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.

I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple.

There has to be a measure of difficulty or problem-solving in travel for it to be worthwhile.

I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster.

I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.

So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.