The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place.

Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.

There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.

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

You can't save the rhinos and you can't preserve a culture. I'm very pessimistic. Once it's gone, it's over.

All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.

Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.

Tibet has a very proud people but it's culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It's like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it's gone.

Kind words produce their images on men's souls.

The problem with you khakis is that you have started believing your own nonsense.

With the catching ends the pleasures of the chase.

But you can't focus on things that matter if all you've been is asleep for forty years. Funny how sleep rhymes with sheep. You know.

The scriptures are in print what Christ is in person.

The sensual mysticism of entire vertical being.

No member of the faithful could possibly deny that the Church is competent in her magisterium to interpret the natural moral law.

A peace-mingling falsehood is preferable to a mischief-stirring truth.

I hate being so emotionally slutty. I need to stop loving everyone I have a long conversation with.

In TV, film, and music there's a lot of snobbery, and I don't like it. I've never been a cultural snob.