Travel Books Quotes

You travel all over," the woman said. "Do you write about your travels?" I said, Yes, I did. Articles. Books. Whatever. "You must write Paul Theroux-type travel books," she said. I said, Exactly, and told her why. ~ Paul Theroux

So I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places, spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafes ... all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, shooting free-throws, or meditating. ~ Phil Cousineau

My bookstore obsession grew to the point where I'd search for new shops during family trips, as though that were the reason for our travel. ~ Lewis Buzbee

A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply. ~ Paul Fussell

Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things. ~ Paul Theroux

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing. ~ Paul Theroux

My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books. ~ Beverly Cleary

I do not believe the fable that men read travel books to escape from reality: they read to escape into it, from a crazy wonderland of armaments, cant, political speeches at once insincere and illiterate, propaganda, and social injustice which the lunacy of humanity has constructed over a period of years. ~ Alex Comfort

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.

Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome. ~ Paul Theroux

I fear that I can no longer travel without technology. Twenty years ago, I loved getting on a bus in West Africa and taking off for a city I'd never been to before, relying on advice from out-of-date travel books and fellow passengers on the bus. Now, I end up using TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google Maps. I probably eat and sleep better when I'm on the road, but I miss the mystery of travel when it was more random and unpredictable. ~ Ethan Zuckerman

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places. ~ Paul Theroux

The novels, travel books and poems I read had a particular smell. The smell of cellars. An almost spicy smell, a mixture of dust and grease. Verdigris. Books today don't have a smell. They don't even smell of print. ~ Jean-Claude Izzo

All along - not only since she left, but for a decade before - I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who - because no one thought she was a person - had no one to really talk to. ~ John Green

Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

That's why people require travel books on the 1960s, I thought. They want to go there. They want to feel that sun on their backs. ~ Roger Hutchinson

The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place. ~ Paul Theroux

In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark. ~ Paul Theroux

The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible. ~ Alain De Botton

Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography. ~ Arthur Smith

The Empress Sabina had long ago formed her own theory about the nonsense in travel books. No traveler, having gone to the expense and trouble of venturing where most civilized people were too sensible to go, was going to come home and admit that it had been a waste of time. Instead, he had to pronounce his destination to be full of strange wonders, like the elk with no knees that could be caught by sabotaging the tree against which it leaned when it slept (Julius Caesar) or the men from India who could wrap themselves in their own ears (reported by the elder Pliny, who seemed to have written down everything he was ever told), or the blue-skinned Britons (Julius Caesar again).
Strangely, no traveler had ever brought one of these creatures home for inspection. Doubtless they were impossible to capture, or died on the journey, or the blue came off in the wash. ~ Ruth Downie

The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world ... ~ Henry Giroux

All coffee shops now have WiFi. Why bring a book when you could be wittily attacking some idiot columnist on Twitter, or responding to your date requests, or posting a picture of your foot? All of that is more gripping and immediate and social than books. ~ Russell Smith

Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Books are companions; choose your companions wisely. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it. ~ Salman Rushdie

Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians". ~ Charles Stross

Laura's bored expression had gradually fallen away as he spoke, and now she looked at him in amazement.
'You do realize I was being rude? Are you being polite because I am a guest and guests are like, what, gods in Indian culture?'
'Only in the history books. We treat guests the same as most people do around the world. Guests are fine as long as they respect boundaries and don't wear out their welcome. But you are more than a guest, Ms Mackenzie, you are a client. And clients are the gods of any business, anywhere in the world. ~ Indu Muralidharan

I am a member of the London Library, and on almost every single job I do, there is some benefit to be had in going there and pulling two or three books off the shelves. ~ Ed Stoppard

The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them; and I was not surprised when he told me that the fathers of the Church had written books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all these intricate questions. ~ James Joyce

When I would sell encyclopedias, I would drive down the road looking for a house with a swing set in the back, and I'd say, "Oh, those folks got kids. They need some books." I'd knock on their door and sell them a set of encyclopedias, and those books were from $300 to $600. I'd look around the house, and if there wasn't that much furniture in the house, I felt a little bad about selling a $600 set of books to people who couldn't afford a couch. So I didn't last at that job very long. ~ Willie Nelson

not warrant or represent at any time that the contents within are accurate due to the rapidly changing nature of the Internet. While all attempts have been made to verify information provided in this publication, the Author and Publisher assume no responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretation of the subject matter herein. Any perceived slights of specific persons, people, or organizations are unintentional. In practical advice books, like anything else in life, there are no guarantees of results. Readers are cautioned to rely on their own judgment about their individual circumstances ~ Homer

It's a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It's a long process to let it happen. ~ Agnes Varda

Reading is awesome. Just escaping into someone else's life, into another world. In books, everything is possible. ~ Nick Lake

I always like to arrive at the airport early to enjoy breakfast and lounge about so that when I get on the plane all my travel fever has disappeared. ~ Julian Fellowes

We offer our books to help you reason through some "egodly" quandaries; although quite frankly, our books are not good enough. They are not good enough because God relies on a human co-author for interpretation, and that of course equals imperfection. God deserves perfection. For that to be achieved Jesus Christ would need to be co-Author of the books; but Jesus Christ already wrote his/her perfect book by living a perfect life in a vastly inferior world to the one He/She (alterably twi-polar) normally claims – that Otherealm of Heaven. ~ T.E. Alford

Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn't know. That's why he was devouring two or three books a day - to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life. ~ Philip Roth

Only reading can leave one satisfied at having lived a thousand lives! ~ Katandra Jackson Nunnally

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness. ~ Joe Hill

I read books and talked to people. I mean that's kind of how one learns anything. There's lots of great books out there & lots of smart people. ~ Elon Musk

Now you can't even carry a nail clipper on a plane. Are they afraid you're going to go ... "All right! Give me the plane or the b*tch loses her cuticle." ? ~ Robin Williams

I only wanted books - nothing more - only books, only words, it was never anything but words - give them to me, I don't have any! Look, see, I don't have any! Look, I'm naked, barefoot, I'm standing before you - nothing in my pants pockets, nothing under my shirt or under my arm! They're not stuck in my beard! Inside - look - there aren't any inside either - everything's been turned inside out, there's nothing there! Only guts! I'm hungry! I'm tormented!...
What do you mean there's nothing? Then how can you talk and cry, what words are you frightened with, which ones do you call out in your sleep? Don't nighttime cries roam inside you, a thudding twilight murmur, a fresh morning shriek? There they are words - don't you recognize them? They're writhing inside you, trying to get out! There they are! They're yours! From wood, stone, roots, growing in strength, a dull mooing and whining in the gut is trying to get out; a piece of tongue curls, the torn nostrils swell in torment. That's how the bewitched, beaten, and twisted snuffle with a mangy wail, their boiled white eyes locked up in closets, their vein torn out, backbone gnawed; that's right, that's how your pushkin writhe, or mushkin - what is in my name for you? - pushkin-mushkin, flung upon the hillock like a shaggy black idol, forever flattened by fences, up to his ears in di, the pushkin-stump, legless, six-fingered, biting his tongue, nose in his chest - and his head can't be raised! - pushkin, tearing off the pois ~ Tatyana Tolstaya

She ran out of space for her libary some time ago, but instead of making the room larger she has opted to let the books become the room. ~ Erin Morgenstern

I discovered Deborah Ellis's books in the school library after my head teacher encouraged me to go beyond the school curriculum and look for books I might enjoy. ~ Malala Yousafzai

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary. ~ Boris Pasternak

When you look at the calculation, it's amazing that every time you try to prove or disprove time travel, you've pushed Einstein's theory to the very limits where quantum effects must dominate. That's telling us that you really need a theory of everything to resolve this question. And the only candidate is string theory. ~ Michio Kaku

Have you never picked up a book you've read before, and found it speaks to you in a new way? ~ Django Wexler

sister's loan. It's not a detailed plan, and technically I have no idea what I'm getting into. However, it's the only option. Finally I reach the edge of pack territory. You can't miss it because there's a huge sign, white paint on a slab of plywood. PRIVATE PROPERTY. And a drawing of a howling wolf. Then a few meters in, another one with a spotlight shining on it. PRIVATE. NO TRESPASSING. I stop in front of that one. If I'm there to talk to the alpha, then I'm not trespassing, right? Gathering my courage, I set off again, the bike squeaking with every inch of travel. I hear a rustling ~ Cleo Peitsche

Books can be possessive, can't they? You're walking around in a bookstore and a certain one will jump out at you, like it had moved there on its own, just to get your attention. Sometimes what's inside will change your life, but sometimes you don't even have to read it. Sometimes it's a comfort just to have a book around. Many of these books haven't even had their spines cracked. 'Why do you buy books you don't even read?' our daughter asks us. That's like asking someone who lives alone why they bought a cat. For company, of course. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

I was pretty sure the only two rooms I needed in my house were a kitchen with a huge table and a library full of books. "It'll ~ April White

One way of saving on energy use would be to do away with unnecessary transportation. For instance, people commute between work and home, or travel long distances to engage in business conferences. With the development of improved communications and increasing automation, it will become possible in the not-too-distant future, for people to control and maintain business operations and machinery at a distance. The ~ Isaac Asimov

There's always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful. ~ Nicholas Sparks

I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary. ~ Werner Herzog

I guess that's why I buried myself in books. There was comfort there. Security. ~ Tom Isbell

Refreshing failures roll off the travel easel like ants from a picnic blanket. ~ Sara Genn

I've always loved reading fantasy. I used to pick out all the books in the library that had the little unicorn sticker on the side to show that they were fantasy. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

The mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction-so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements-that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission. ~ Howard Zinn

Pleasing things: finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment. ~ Sei Shonagon

One generation after another falls like honeybees upon this memorable forest, rifle its sweets, pack themselves with vital memories, and when the theft is consummated depart again into life richer, but poorer also. The forest, indeed, they have possessed, from that day forward it is theirs dissolubly, and they will never return to walk in it at night in the fondest of their dreams, and use it forever in their books and pictures. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I'm going to do more movies and travel. ~ Tommy Wiseau