Bruce Chatwin Quotes

Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.

Travel doesn't merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind.

To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.

I haven't got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other god.

As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.

Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.

Music… is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.

When people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough.

Because they knew each other's thoughts, they even quarrelled without speaking.

And when you look along the way we've come, there are spirals of vultures wheeling.

The song and the land are one.

For life is a journey through a wilderness

As you go along, you literally collect places. I'm fed up with going to places; I shan't go to anymore.

I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.

Anything was better than to be loved for one's things.

The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.

I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculptures, I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered.

Being lost in Australia gives you a lovely feeling of security.

Tyranny sets up its own echo-chamber.

A journey is a fragment of Hell.

It's an old sailor's idea that every ship has a rope with one end made fast to her bows and the other held by the loved ones at home.

'I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China, and continue my profession.' 'As sanitary engineer?' 'No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries of the world.'

And the formation of man is the most pressing problem facing humanity.

The real home of man is not his house but the road. Life itself is a travel that has to be done by foot.

Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I'd want to murder.