“Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way”

“But art should require no instrument but memory.”

“So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.”

“A British traveler remarked, 'There are [fashions in Guatemala] which it would require more than common charity to speak of with respect...'" FILL IN YOUR OWN GRIPES! ;-)”

“Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.”

“You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.”

“You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.”