Travel Writer Quotes & Sayings

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company. — Andre Gide

So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them. In return, Dexter sent her postcards with insufficient postage: 'Amsterdam is MAD', 'Barcelona INSANE', 'Dublin ROCKS. Sick as DOG this morning.' As a travel writer, he was no Bruce Chatwin, but still she would slip the postcards in the pocket of a heavy coat on long soulful walks on Ilkley Moor, searching for some hidden meaning in 'VENICE COMPLETELY FLOODED!!!! — David Nicholls

To become a writer a person must read constantly, the more varied the writers and their material then all the better. One must also have a lot of life experience, travel to exotic locations and live among the local people. Yet most importantly a writer needs the determination to keep at their writing regardless of what others might say or think about it — Andrew James Pritchard

My motto? Don't trust someone who is just as cagey as yourself."
"What kind of detective are you?" "A lousy one and proud of it. I write, remember?"
She looked down at her hand & laughed. "Berretta doesn't make lighters." "Why I was a writer! My life revolved around fiction. I could make something up"
"She looked down at her hand & laughed. "Berretta doesn't make lighters."
"So they're not Tolstoy, they're a little shorter ... Okay, okay a lot. Go ahead, read my mystery series anyway."
"A detective has their boundaries especially me. So mine shifted occasionally ... okay a lot"
"Beat it, Buster. My temper and this mace have a hair trigger."
"Interference could be lethal." I got right up in his face, hissing, "Don't push me, I'm hormonal."
I'm not really a lousy detective, just rough around the edges. — Peggy A. Edelheit

Perhaps behind our occasional hostility toward the artist and writer there may be a slight tinge of jealousy. The man or woman who for the sake of family life, children, takes up work he does not like, disciplines himself, sacrifices some fantasy he had once, to travel or to paint, or even possibly to write, may feel toward the artist and writer a jealousy of his adventurous life. The artist and the writer have generally paid the full price for their independence and for the privilege of doing work they love, or for their artistic rebellions against standardized living or values. — Anais Nin

You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel. — Tim Cahill

You may follow the footsteps
The whole day will pass
With you going around in circles
Yet not reaching anywhere at last! — Avijeet Das

I reside in an abode where your thoughts imagine me... You reside in my heart where the auricles camouflage my longing... — Avijeet Das

Sometimes people read a book in order to not go on a trip. You read a book instead of going on the trip. And so the travel writer is doing the traveling for you. — Paul Theroux

You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write. — Tim Cahill

He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn't deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies ... Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it. — Enrique Vila-Matas

For decades I've had an intense interest in the history and mythology of the Silk Road, I think in part because an aspect of me loves the resonance of long distance travel as a theme or anchor, if you will, for narrative. The ways that cultures rise and fade across centuries, the ways cultures connect and conflict, absorb and reject, transform or remain static: As a writer this is thematic content that never gets old for me. A million million stories rise out of the endless back and forth of cultural contact in all its best and worst aspects, and everything in between. Weave that within a story of adventure or empire or a journey into unknown spaces and I'm in writer and reader hog heaven. — Kate Elliott

As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end. — Tahir Shah

To the traditional traveller - let alone travel writer - this might seem absurd. The whole point of travel is to go deep. To spend time in a place, to get under its skin. How can one possibly appreciate what makes a city or a country tick in a bare ten hours — Hugh Thomson

BLOOM: As far as I'm concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, they're called, a black Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And then someone else types it.
INTERVIEWER: And someone else edits?
BLOOM: No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited. — Harold Bloom

If I tell a hotel I'm a travel writer, I can't get out of there without spending a few hours looking at every single room! — Arthur Frommer

No one has expressed it better than a great novelist I heard once on a talk show who said something like You want to know the price I pay for being a writer? Okay, I'll tell you. I travel by plane a great deal. And I'm usually seated next to some huge businessman who works on files or his laptop computer for a while, and then notices me and asks me what I do. And I say I'm a writer. Then there's always a terrible silence. Then he says eagerly, 'Have you written anything I might have heard of? — Anne Lamott

I would love to be a travel writer. I'd be so stoked. — Drew Barrymore

I'm not your expert on Africa or animals or whatever. I'm not a travel writer or maker of documentaries. I was someone who doesn't know very much, trying to communicate. — Michael Palin

I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader. — Paul Theroux

Isolation filled with loud silence is a writer's paradise. I wonder how far north toward the Mediterranean must I travel to get there. — Terry A. O'Neal

You don't need moolah if you're a travel writer," I said. — Jeff Soloway

One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even be a story about an actual trip to Mars! — Michael Flynn

What a great thing! To be a writer! Words are something you can carry in your head. You can really 'travel light.' — Robert Creeley

88. People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I've been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it's the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris. — Roman Payne

The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth. — Paul Theroux

I used to wish I would be a painter or a violinist, where maybe I wouldn't need to travel as much. Or maybe if I were a writer, I wouldn't need to travel as much. It's the travel that kind of killed me. And the hours. I always pictured if I were a painter you could make your own hours maybe ... work after the kids were asleep ... — Kathy Baker

But the point is, when the writer turns to address the reader, he or she must not only speak to me - naively dazzled and wholly enchanted by the complexities of the trickery, and thus all but incapable of any criticism, so that, indeed, he can claim, if he likes, priestly contact with the greater powers that, hurled at him by the muse, travel the parsecs from the Universe's furthest shoals, cleaving stars on the way, to shatter the specific moment and sizzle his brains in their pan, rattle his teeth in their sockets, make his muscles howl against his bones, and to galvanize his pen so the ink bubbles and blisters on the nib (nor would I hear her claim to such as other than a metaphor for the most profound truths of skill, craft, or mathematical and historical conjuration) - but she or he must also speak to my student, for whom it was an okay story, with just so much description. — Samuel R. Delany

Finney is about the best writer of time travel stories ever, and I adore time travel stories - have to make a time travel game someday! — Warren Spector

Once the travel guide came out and won an award, once I got an MFA in creative writing, once I sold my next novel, I finally started telling people that I was a writer. I remember how special that year felt. — James Bernard Frost

Such are the humiliations of the travel writer in the late 20th century: go to the ends of the earth to search for the most exotic heretics in the world, and you will find that they have cornered the kebab business at the end of your street in London. — William Dalrymple

I just don't see myself as a travel writer. I can't. I don't. — Robyn Davidson

I still believe in you, as a writer, but the only stuff we ever had in common doesn't travel very far."
"What stuff is that?" he'd asked her.
"We're completely at ease being naked in front of strangers and total fuckheads", she'd told him. Maybe that's part of what being a writer entails, Danny Baciagalupo found himself thinking on that rainy spring night in Iowa city. — John Irving

I had begun reading the book on the plane just after take-off. And I realised that something does happen to you when you read fiction above ground: The intensity of each word and phrase is magnified and the world which the writer has created for you takes on a greater dimension than before. After a while, you can't tell fiction from fact. — Phan Ming Yen

As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self - the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells - and keep an objective eye on the reader. — William Zinsser

As a fiction writer, all I need is a laptop, and when I'm not teaching, I travel as much as I can, applying for every research grant and overseas gig I hear of, then trying to extend those trips as far as the stipends will go. I love to travel alone. — Molly Antopol

In order to be a better writer, one must always write. — Safa Shaqsy

This is a consistent theme in stories about traveling to the future: Things are always worse when you get there. And I suspect this is because the kind of writer who's intrigued by the notion of moving forward in time can't see beyond their own pessimism about being alive. People who want to travel through time are both (a) unhappy and (b) unwilling to compromise anything about who they are. They would rather change every element of society except themselves. — Chuck Klosterman

Gordon Lightfoot looms pretty large in my life as a writer and an artist in general. I never travel anywhere without at least two of his records with me. — Ron Sexsmith

I want to design for the working women. Okay well - it sounds like 90% of us are that. But really, we are more. We are working women who like to cook, to travel; we are a girlfriend, a writer. We are so much more than just being defined by the one job we have. — Sarah Lafleur

Writing is not always a writer's playtime. It's actually a work in progress. Few understand this and mistakenly believe we're wasting time. But it's never a waste of time when doing what you love. — David Lucero

The [travel] writer, looking back at the journey from a distance of a year or two (or three), is a different character from the hapless character who undertook the trip: wise after the event, with the leisure to tease out meanings from the experience that the distracted traveler never had, and often impatient with his alter ego's blinkered and unsatisfactory version of things. — Jonathan Raban

As a writer I'm committed to exploring what I call "The invisible things" - the things that people aren't talking about. I think that's where the juiciest conversations and the juiciest drama lives. My goal with the series is to get people talking about and reflecting on how issues of race play out in their own lives. Since I've spent a fair amount of time watching time travel shows and movies where the leads are White (and can blend in really easily no matter the time period) I thought I would turn that on its head and see what might happen. — Steven C. Harper

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there. — Sara Sheridan

I would want to travel the world and write about it. To be a famous writer. — Shantel VanSanten

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

In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural. — James Salter

The most amazing travellers were to humble to write about it — Guido Colombo

This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within. — May Sarton

But he knew people and he was head writer for Have Gun Will Travel, and if you took those early Star Treks that we did and put us in a western wardrobe and put us on wagon train going west, we can say the same lines. — Majel Barrett

The attributes you need to be a travel writer are somewhat contradictory. For travel you need to be tough and resilient and to write you must be sensitive and sympathetic. — Colin Thubron

A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom. — Cyril Connolly

William Dalrymple has superseded Mark Tully as the voice of India ... He may well be the greatest travel writer of his generation. — Robert Twigger

What first stuns the young writer emerging from college is that there is no clear-cut road for him to travel on. He must chop a path in the wilderness of his own soul, a disheartening process, lifelong and lonesome and therefore, of what use graduate work? — Brad Gooch

He regarded himself as an accomplished writer - a clear sign of madness in anyone. — Paul Theroux

Travel definitely affects me as a writer. — Anthony Doerr

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. — Paul Theroux

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination. — Alexander Cockburn

Great travel writing consists of equal parts curiosity, vulnerability and vocabulary. It is not a terrain for know-it-alls or the indecisive. The best of the genre can simply be an elegant natural history essay, a nicely writ sports piece, or a well-turned profile of a bar band and its music. A well-grounded sense of place is the challenge for the writer. We observe, we calculate, we inquire, we look for a link between what we already know and what we're about to learn. The finest travel writing describes what's going on when nobody's looking. — Tom Miller

Had his room been facing west he would have noted the sparkling twenty-five-mile vista to the sea which looks almost like the Mediterranean. He would have noted how the streets of L.A. undulate over short hills as though a finger is poking the landscape from underneath. How laid over this crosshatch are streets meandering on the diagonal creating a multitude of ways to get from one place to another by traveling along the hypotenuse. These are the avenues of the tryst which enable Acting Student A to travel the eighteen miles across town to Acting Student B's garage apartment in nine minutes flat after a hot-blooded phone call at midnight. Had he been facing seaward on a balcony overlooking the city the writer might have heard drifting out of a tiny apartment window the optimistic voice of a shower singer imbued with the conviction that this is a place where it is possible to be happy. — Steve Martin

Travel for a writer means placing diamonds in memory. — Kevin R. Hill

I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't want people to ask me questions about it. — Paul Theroux

This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet. — Rebecca Solnit

And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach. — Paul Fussell

The travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote that our nomadic past lives on in our need for distraction, our mania for the new. — Gloria Steinem

Being a writer usually entails a fairly quiet life. However much travel one might do, however many tours and appearances, the job entails solitude: long hours in libraries, long hours at a desk. — Jill Paton Walsh