Jim

“Younger writers are always looking for "blurbs," one of the few words that sounds exactly as awful as the crime it's describing.”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 3

“Wherever you go in the world, most people are pretty nice. They are eager to show you the best parts of the places they live. What gives interlopers the right to riffle through their dirty laundry?”
― Chuck Thompson

“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

“Travel without surprise was merely an agenda.”
― Jim Malusa, Into Thick Air: Biking to the Bellybutton of Six Continents