Basically, what you find out is the limits of your patience and your strength and your capacity to adapt. You find that out in travel and being alone and being tested. So that's a great thing.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

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

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.

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

You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.

All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.