The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.

Whoever the last true cowboy in America turns out to be, he's likely to be an Indian.

The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how you build it, the motel remains the haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand.

At the beginning we learn to travel, then we travel to learn.

For me, writing is not a search for explanations but a ramble in quest of what informs a place, a hunt for equivalents.

Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he's going or understand what he sees?

With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.