Travel Books Quotes:

Traveling - it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.

- Ibn Battuta

topic: Inspirational, Travel, Adventurous, Solo Travel, Nomadic

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

- Laozi

topic: Inspirational, Travel, Arriving, Journey And Destination, Journey Home

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

- Mark Twain

topic: Travel, Memorable, Carpe Diem, Solo Travel, Inspirational Adventure

All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king.

- J. R. R. Tolkien

source: J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings”, p.127, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

topic: Faith, Strong, Kings, Inspiring Movie, Travel Light

The more you read, the more things you will know.

- Dr. Seuss

topic: Library Cards, Learning To Read, Joy Of Learning, Joy Of Reading, Inspirational Children

I fear that I can no longer travel without technology. Twenty years ago, I loved getting on a bus in West Africa and taking off for a city I'd never been to before, relying on advice from out-of-date travel books and fellow passengers on the bus. Now, I end up using TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google Maps. I probably eat and sleep better when I'm on the road, but I miss the mystery of travel when it was more random and unpredictable.

- Ethan Zuckerman

source: Source: www.bostonglobe.com

topic: Book, Sleep, Technology, West Africa, Google Maps

In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.

- Paul Theroux

source: Paul Theroux (2011). “The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road”, p.6, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

topic: Travel, Book, Reading, Travel Books

All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.

- John Green

source: John Green (2010). “Paper Towns”, p.137, Bloomsbury Publishing

topic: Book, Knowing, People, Travel Books

A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about having a very bad time, having a miserable time, even better. You don't want to read a book about someone having a great time in the South of France, eating and drinking and falling in love. What you want to read is a book about a guy going through the jungle, going through the arctic snow, having a terrible time trying to cross the Sahara, and solving problems as they go.

- Paul Theroux

source: Source: www.pbs.org

topic: Falling In Love, Drinking, Book, Sahara, Terrible Times

Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- "and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you.

- Paul Theroux

source: Paul Theroux (2001). “The Best American Travel Writing 2001”, p.21, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

topic: Strong, Book, Writing, Albania, Pacific

A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.

- Paul Fussell

topic: Travel, Book, Romance, Travel Books

I suppose anyone who has ever written a travel book has had the experience of being accosted by a reader with blood in his eye and a lawsuit in his voice.

- Ilka Chase

topic: Book, Eye, Blood, Travel Books

The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.

- Alain de Botton

topic: Book, Secret, Fascination, Travel Books

Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

- Kazuo Ishiguro

source: "Living memories". Interview with Nicholas Wroe, www.theguardian.com. February 18, 2005.

topic: Dream, Travel, Book, Travel Books

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.

- Jonathan Raban

source: Jonathan Raban (1987). “For love & money: writing, reading, travelling, 1969-1987”

topic: Travel, Book, Journey, Fragmentation, Deceptive

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

- Evelyn Waugh

source: Evelyn Waugh (1983). “The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh”, Methuen

topic: Book, Worst, Novel, Travel Books

We didn't have television in those days, and many people didn't even have radios. My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening.

- Beverly Cleary

topic: Mother, Father, People, Travel Books

Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places, spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafes . . . all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, shooting free-throws, or meditating.

- Phil Cousineau

topic: Book, Reading, Practice, Free Throw, Faraway Places

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

- Paul Theroux

source: Interview with Michael Shapiro, www.sfgate.com. May 28, 2011.

topic: Travel, Book, Writing, Travel Books

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

- Paul Theroux

topic: Travel, Book, Novelists, Travel Books

Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things.

- Paul Theroux

source: Source: www.pbs.org

topic: Falling In Love, Book, Thinking, Travel Books

Good travel books are novels at heart.

- Jonathan Raban

source: Recalled by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the NewYorkTimes, 26 Jan1987, reviewing Raban's novel Coasting (1986).

topic: Book, Heart, Novel, Travel Books

Don Quixote's 'Delusions' is an excellent read - far better than my own forthcoming travel book, 'Walking Backwards Across Tuscany.'

- Arthur Smith

topic: Book, Tuscany, Excellent, Forthcoming, Walking Backwards

The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.

- Bill Bryson

topic: Book, Successful, Firsts, Travel Books