A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.

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

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

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.

They say that if the Swiss had designed these mountains they'd be rather flatter.

The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life - the homebound writer's irritants. But also being kept waiting is the human conditon.

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