The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace.

Reading liberates you. You could know about the world through reading.

Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.

You may not know it but I'm no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in.

I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.

I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.