Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.

Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.

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

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.

A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler. Nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness.

There are two worlds: the world of the tourist and the world of everyone else. Often they're side by side. But the tourist doesn't actually see how people live.