Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.

There is not much to say about most airplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food.

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

There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.

A French traveler with a sore throat is a wonderful thing to behold, but it takes more than tonsillitis to prevent a Frenchman from boasting.

The long morning shadows lay as still and dark as lakes and patterned the rough ground with straight margins.

Yonder were mountains: the sunlight revealed their tiny heads and wide shoulders, craggy and purple, with small black trees, delicate as eyelashes, on their slopes.

The Colombians are good-tempered people. They are used to waiting for buses that are late, used to riding buses and trains that do not arrive.

The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing.