No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.

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

I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.

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

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.

The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that equals the Yangtze River, that equals the Nile. We have the greatest cities in the world - among the greatest cities in the world. We have a large population. We have challenges. We have an indigenous population.

The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.