Top 100 Quotes About Travel Writing
#1. 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.
John Gimlette
#2. 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.
John Gimlette
#3. Travel writing is harrowing. You are in paradise, more or less, having to prove it is paradise. It is hard to have a good time trying to figure out a way to say you are having a good time, whether you are having it or not, even in paradise.
Padgett Powell
#4. I know about the sweet home. I went to school with 'em boys, what became Lynyrd Skynyrd; I knew Allen Collins, the skinny girl-beautiful guitarist. I put Allen Collins in every travel piece I do. Travel writing is harrowing, going to Bermuda with a banjo on my knee.
Padgett Powell
#5. I'd read books in Russian, and they would take me forever. I wanted to write a book that would last and would not be superficial. Siberian-travel writing is its own genre.
Ian Frazier
#7. 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.
Paul Theroux
#8. 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.
John Gimlette
#9. I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual.
Jan Morris
#10. My three favorite travel writers of all time are Robert Louis Stevenson, Graham Greene, and Chuck Thompson. Smile When You're Lying not only tells the truth about the travel-writing racket, it gets to the heart of some of the travel industry's best-kept secrets.
Kinky Friedman
#11. The truth is I'm not really interested in travel writing as it's generally conceived, and even less so in female travel writing.
Robyn Davidson
#12. Being more aware will enable you to have only astonishing impressions, avoiding any of the disappointing experiences like some of those we went through.
Sahara Sanders
#13. As long as you're breathing, it's never too late to reconnect with a long-held love.
Gina Greenlee
#14. The research. It is always the best part of writing. And, of course, it is the great excuse to travel.
Michael Scott
#15. With my pen I have engraved warrants of citizenship in the most remote corners, for truly the world has been my home.
James A. Michener
#16. Take a great adventure to a place, learn the rich history and make your own observation about the place.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#18. If "Been there, done that" isn't your mantra,then make haste down your "bucket list.
Gina Greenlee
#19. In recent years, I've been writing because I'm fortunate enough to work in the world of food television, to travel and taste and learn about cooking from the best chefs in the business.
Ted Allen
#20. Increase the number of adventures you act on and you'll lighten the weight of regret.
Gina Greenlee
#21. I knew I could always earn money from a job. What I didn't know was could I extend the dream of writing beyond my trip?
Gina Greenlee
#22. As we travel to new places we gain new perspectives and renew our thinking.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#23. There were signs everywhere but none that I could read or even hope to decipher. These multi-lined symbols unhinged my familiar world.
Gerry Abbey
#24. Deferring judgement to a later date resolves nothing and all you are left with is a box of jumbled slides and a collection of knick-knacks and odds and ends. Here a face. There a sunset.
Will Ferguson
#25. Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining, where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose.
Arthur Smith
#27. Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.
Alan Dean Foster
#28. We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301).
Jack Kerouac
#29. As the silence returned, I sat back and felt the tension ease away; I hadn't even known I was tense. A few moments passed and once again the cycling fan laced in with the clanging chains and mixed with the rumbling mower and the buzzing insects.
Gerry Abbey
#34. If it's true we only live once, then raise your red velvet curtain every chance you get.
Gina Greenlee
#35. When you focus on the journey, you will be blessed with guardian angels to direct your path.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#36. Sometimes a journey arises out of hope and instinct, the heady conviction, as your finger travels along the map: Yes, here and here ... and here. These are the nerve-ends of the world ...
Colin Thubron
#37. I find research fascinating and always conduct some before I begin writing, and then fill in the rest as needed. I read stacks of books and also had the opportunity to travel to England to do more research.
Julie Klassen
#38. At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the reason is this: On the islands one has both the time and the inclination to communicate with the stars and the trees and the waves drifting ashore, one lives more intensely.
James A. Michener
#39. When you take the right stairs you will arrive at the precise destination.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#40. I would much rather not be the center of attention, and I'd much rather travel and be writing my novel, rather than standing on a stage and trying to get people to understand something.
Willis Earl Beal
#41. I remember telling my creative writing teacher that you never want to have a journal, because if you lose it, then someone's going to know all your secrets. And then she stopped using a journal, but I always write everything down ... Anytime I travel, I try and fill up notepads.
Garrett Hedlund
#42. Foolish acts and bold adventures almost always appear, especially in the beginning, to be the absolute same thing.
Leigh Ann Henion
#43. I like photography and writing and travel, so I have a lot of cerebral occupations. I am going to become a sailor and do a world tour on my yacht if I don't get any more work.
Audrey Tautou
#44. Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.
Evelyn Waugh
#45. A challenge that tested Tom to his limit but in return gave him more than he could ever have imagined.
Bear Grylls
#47. The most amazing travellers were to humble to write about it
Guido Colombo
#48. I ended up in the back seat of a chicken truck's cab heading through beautiful scenery and disastrous roads to my hotel. About an hour later, we stopped to sell a few hundred of the chickens to a butcher shop.
Jennifer S. Alderson
#49. I really like to travel when I write. Something about seeing new things and being in new cultures and environments provokes new thoughts in your head.
Josh Radnor
#50. I want to board a train, and leave my books behind. I want to be so caught up in writing about the journey, that I forget that fiction & fact are not the same. The destination does not signify.
Hannah Harding
#51. I know I am planning to visit a "land" that is not entirely foreign, only foreign to me. As an adventurer, I am on a journey that I believe will last me my whole life. A new relationship, discovery, or awareness excites me.
Marilyn Barnicke Belleghem
#52. And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.
Gerry Abbey
#53. Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
Paul Theroux
#54. You spend all this time inside, alone, writing. And then it becomes about travel and new places and new people. And I do love talking to people about the book, but ideally, I like a little less disruptive lifestyle, I like it when things are more organized.
Garance Dore
#56. My preferred pastimes are conversation, reading, travel and writing, in that order.
Truman Capote
#58. Give full attention to life's moments
and the images you capture will be everlasting.
Gina Greenlee
#59. If asked which words one associated with the Sahara, only the most dedicated surrealist might be expected to offer "whale".
Eamonn Gearon
#60. As Thoreau famously sead, it doesn't matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.
Pico Iyer
#61. In these pages, traveling "solo" does not necessarily mean "alone." The absence of other people often suggests regretful isolation. "Solo" by contrast, is a willful decision to be the architect of our own experience.
Gina Greenlee
#62. It is a transition, from modelling to singing, but for me it's a natural progression. The modelling was something I did to travel the world and make some money and end up doing what I want to do. It was a way for me to go gather the experience to write an album and now sing about it.
Erica Packer
#63. Despite my vast interest in other universes and new ideas and space, travel and time travel, which by the way I think is impossible, the basic thing is human character, which is the main thing of most writers.
Philip Jose Farmer
#64. Before me and beside me sat a row of the comeliest young men, clad in black gowns and wearing on their shoulders long hoods trimmed in white fur. Who and what they were I know not, for I preferred not to learn, lest by chance they should not be so mediaeval as they looked.
Henry James
#65. Our lives follow the stories we tell ourselves.
Gina Greenlee
#67. The trip changed all that. Stirring the murk of a life ill-fitting, Something More was perceptible though without name or form. Something More was the genesis of a map, not one handed to me but rendered with each step taken, a skill seasoned by a cruise gone bad.
Gina Greenlee
#68. All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day (235).
Jack Kerouac
#69. Foras Road has a sordid reputation ( ... ) Old crones sat in doorways, while their daughters were pushed out to earn money. It is intriguing that a society which is very covert with sexuality should be so straightforward about prostitution.
Tahir Shah
#70. a good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving" Taoist dictum quoted by Sam Miller
Sam Miller
#71. Travel has a way of making the world a much smaller place.
Janna Graber
#72. Your past experiences will flavour your future ones, that is human nature.
Deborah Cater
#73. When life hands you lemons, why stop at lemonade? Create an entire product line.
Gina Greenlee
#74. Ten years ago I wondered, "How does one travel around the world? How does one step out of a well-established life to follow the dream?" I've answered those questions. But now new ones emerge.
Gina Greenlee
#75. An unlimited supply of wonder and trust, bolsters life lived as a process of discovery.
Gina Greenlee
#77. All in all, even some kinds of unexpected and ridiculous disappointments couldn't diminish the astonishment of being in this place with its spectacular nature.
Sahara Sanders
#78. One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one's life ...
Evelyn Waugh
#79. If you built the box, you can also break it down.
Gina Greenlee
#80. Sicily is paradise. I live in paradise. Now pass the pasta please.
Alfred Zappala
#81. Normal, day-to-day things inspire you to write. I try to travel and chill, and go out and enjoy the outdoors. That makes you see the real world. Not just in the studio or at concerts. I live it up as normal as I can.
Prince Royce
#82. Traveling is my priority, because it drives the writing, so I teach around the travel, and sometimes the travel is the teaching.
Pam Houston
#83. Sometimes it is just about taking the first step, only then can greatness find us.
Colleen Mariotti
#84. My favorite travel pastime is writing music, either with my guitar or on my computer.
Alexander Ludwig
#85. To be taken seriously about doing something creative and probably travel a lot. That was my motivation. I knew I was good, I knew I could write. I also knew you could get laid really easily.
David Bowie
#86. For me they go hand in hand. When I travel it makes me want to write, when I read it makes me want to travel.
William Dalrymple
#87. I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn't have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape.
Chelsea Cain
#89. If you've broken any promises you've made to yourself, now is the time to make up for it.
Gina Greenlee
#90. I wanted to be a singer. I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to travel and write songs and be a good songwriter. It came to me slowly after college.
Brett Dennen
#91. You know that feeling when you first arrive in a new city? However tired you are, however shattered by the flight, you are impatient to get out and sample the streets, the life, the action.
Geoff Dyer
#92. I've been gratified to see over the twenty or so years of my writing life the West become less of a colony of the East; maybe new technologies and too much travel undermine the idea of provinciality.
Rebecca Solnit
#93. I never stay with people and I never look people up when I travel. I depend more on just chance meetings. The advantage is that people don't know who I am. I meet people casually and they're not doing me a big favor because I'm going to write something.
Paul Theroux
#94. Every story is a ride to some place and time other than here and now. Buried in an armchair, reclined on a couch, prostrate on your bed, or glued to your desk, you can go places and travel through time.
A.A. Patawaran
#95. 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
#99. I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.
Tahir Shah
#100. Sometimes we have to break down to break through.
Gina Greenlee
