World Travel Quotes

“Most of us are lucky to see Paris once in a lifetime. Make the most of it by doing as little as possible. Walk a little, get lost a bit, eat, catch a breakfast buzz, have a nap, try and have sex if you can, just not with a mime. Eat again. Lounge around drinking coffee. Maybe read a book. Drink some wine, walk around a bit more, eat, repeat. See? It’s easy.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“Is the Waffle House universally awesome? It is indeed, marvelous, an irony-free zone where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts; where everybody, regardless of race, creed, color, or degree of inebriation, is welcomed—its warm yellow glow a beacon of hope and salvation, inviting the hungry, the lost, the seriously hammered all across the South to come inside. A place of safety and nourishment. It never closes, it is always faithful, always there for you.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“All of us, when we travel, look at the places we go, the things we see, through different eyes. And how we see them is shaped by our previous lives, the books we’ve read, the films we’ve seen, the baggage we carry.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“There is no other place on earth even remotely like New Orleans. Don’t even try to compare it with anywhere else. Even trying to describe it is tricky, as chances are, no matter how much you love it, you don’t really know it. No last call at bars, lots and lots of great food. We know that. Locals who are, well, uniquely wonderful. There’s an attitude here that defies all setbacks, all the things wrong with this fabulously, famously fucked-up city that defies logic in the very best possible ways.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“if you’re going to a country, particularly in Southeast Asia, [where] you’ve never been before, it’s a very good idea to go to the market first, see what they’re selling, get an idea of what they’re good at, what the people are buying.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“I wanted to be apart from everything I grew up with. In short, I wanted to be elsewhere.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“every chef I’ve ever met, if you asked them, ‘If you had to spend the rest of your life in one country, eating one country’s food for the rest of your life, where would that be?’ They’re all gonna say the same thing: Japan. Tokyo.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“The absolute worst thing to do when you come to Paris is plan too much. Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, Arc de Triomphe, stand in line for hours to experience what everybody says you have to. Me? I like to take it easy in Paris, especially if I’m only in town for a few days. “Most of us are lucky to see Paris once in a lifetime. Make the most of it by doing as little as possible. Walk a little, get lost a bit, eat, catch a breakfast buzz, have a nap, try and have sex if you can, just not with a mime. Eat again. Lounge around drinking coffee. Maybe read a book. Drink some wine, walk around a bit more, eat, repeat.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“You know, I'll tell you honestly: if you like food and you haven't come here to eat, you're really missing the fucking boat. This is world-class food; this is world-class wine; this is world-class cheese. The next big thing is Croatia. If you haven't been here, you're a fucking idiot. I'm an idiot.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“Most of us are lucky to see Paris once in a lifetime. Make the most of it by doing as little as possible. Walk a little, get lost a bit, eat, catch a breakfast buzz, have a nap, try and have sex if you can, just not with a mime.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“I feel like Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame—if he stayed in nice hotel suites with high-thread-count sheets. I feel kind of like a freak, and . . . very isolated.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“Who gets to tell the stories?” asked Tony on the Kenya episode of Parts Unknown, which he made with his CNN colleague W. Kamau Bell. It was the last episode for which he recorded narration, and the winner, in 2019, of an Emmy Award for television writing. “This is a question asked often. The answer, in this case, for better or for worse, is, ‘I do.’ At least this time out. I do my best. I look. I listen. But in the end, I know: it’s my story, not Kamau’s, not Kenya’s, or Kenyans’. Those stories are yet to be heard.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“You know what’s good? Books. I’m not ashamed to say it. I read.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“To know Jersey is to love her.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“There was once a mean house cat who would drink your whiskey and bite you; now there’s a friendly dog, Peeve, for whom you can buy “shots” of dog treats, the proceeds from which are donated to animal shelters.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“I am a pretty loyal guy. When I fall in love, I fall hard. And even if we part, years later, there’s still, chances are, love in my heart. And my love for this place, dimly but fondly remembered from years ago, will last forever. It’s a national treasure.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“every shelf is personally curated by the well-read staff. They have an amazing and esoteric collection of unsurpassed LA-related weirdness. A great and rare pocket of wonderful and strange and beautiful. And they’re a major stopover for all the heavy-hitting authors to read. Everybody loves this place.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“I thought it was the kind of bar my guy [Rebus] would drink in,” said Rankin. “Very unaffected, very unpretentious, basic, stripped back. Almost like a private club. Everybody knows everybody else. . . . The kind of Edinburgh I was writing about was this secret Edinburgh that tourists never saw, the stuff that was happening just below the surface, and I thought [Oxford Bar] a nice representation of that.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“A prophet once said, ‘Don’t tell me what a man says, don’t tell me what a man knows. Tell me where he has traveled.’ I wonder about that. Do we get smarter, more enlightened as we travel? Does travel bring wisdom?”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“I come from a small family. Even at holiday meals, it was just me, my father, mother, younger brother, and maybe a cousin once in a while. Maybe that’s one reason I’ve always been kind of bitter about not being Italian American, why I always kind of yearn for that, those scenes in movies where the whole family’s sitting around at a long table, kids running around everywhere. Even when they were arguing, that looked good to me.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“After a while, even the most beautiful scenery threatens to become moving wallpaper—background—but other times, it all seems to come together: the work, the play, all the places I’ve been, where I am now, a happy, stupid, wonderful confluence of events.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“Shockingly, people here, throughout the country, after being relentlessly screwed by history, are just as relentlessly nice.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“Five hundred years of truly appalling colonialism, eighteen years of enthusiastic but inept Communism, and a brutal and senseless sixteen-year civil war ending less than twenty years ago left Mozambique with a devastated social fabric, a shattered economy, and only the memory of an infrastructure.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“The tagine’s dome top is supposed to force the condensation back into the dish and keep it moist and tender.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“Live the dream for a bit. But keep your eyes open. And be careful. As you’ll see, many visitors came to Tangier for a short vacation and remained for life. It’s that kind of place.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“Like Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco or the Times Square of New York’s seedier, darker era, Tangier’s time as a freewheeling playground for artistic deviants has long passed.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“we have barely scratched the surface of what Mexican food really is. It is not melted cheese over a tortilla chip. It is not simple, or easy. It is not simply ‘bro food’ at halftime. It is, in fact, old; older even than the great cuisines of Europe and often deeply complex, refined, subtle, and sophisticated.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“In Oaxaca, ancient indigenous traditions and ingredients define not only the mescal, but also the food.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“Out of this world. Best tortilla ever. There’s not even any pork in it.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“In Mexico City, as in any enlightened culture, street food is king.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide