I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.

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.

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

It's not fashionable but I like to spit out of the window of a moving train.

Sometimes people read a book in order to not go on a trip. You read a book instead of going on the trip. And so the travel writer is doing the traveling for you.

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

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.