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The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.
Sep 24, 2025
American travel writing is very healthy. I'm always flicking through the reviews and I see plenty of travel writing - and an impressive line up and continual demand.
There is a whole genre of funny travel writers - that's very popular. There's Bill Bryson and people who follow that route and sell travel writing through making people laugh. It's a very difficult group to take. The line between comedy and mockery is sometimes a bit thin.
I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual.
Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.
The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.
Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven & hell & I have only a vague curiosity about one of those.
I feel better off doing what I know how to do. I feel a strong element of fictional style in travel writing anyway. Some call it creative nonfiction.
Prague is not, strictly speaking, travel writing but it is, among other things, an excellent example of what travel writing is becoming, if indeed it hasn't already done so. . . . People are no longer so easily satisfied by the mere travel impressions of some outsider much like themselves. Instead they gravitate towards writers who actually have lived not simply in, but inside, a location for an extended period, as one lives inside one's clothes.
People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.
The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad.
One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.
Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- "and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
To travel is to take a journey into yourself.
Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.
Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality.
We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.
The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.
According to the ancient Chinese proverb, A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world. Mary
We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure.
When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.
Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.
We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.
Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.
Once the travel bug bites, there is no known antidote.
Traveling - it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.
Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.