Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life

Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.

You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.

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

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.

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.