56 Quotes by Paul Fussell

Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travellers . . . seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.

All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveller learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.

Most people who seek attention and regard by announcing that they’re writing a novel are actually so devoid of narrative talent that they can’t hold the attention of a dinner table for thirty seconds, even with a dirty joke.

What someone doesn’t want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.

Two motives urge fans to obsession with their sports. One is the need- – through the appeal of vicarious success – -to identify with winners. The other is to sanction, through pedantry, dogmatism, record-keeping, wise secret knowledge, and pseudo-scholarship, a claim to expertise on the subject. Sports give every man his opportunity to perform as a learned bore and to watch innumerable commentators on TV do the same.

Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and it’s fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment.

I would read accounts of so-called battles I had been in, and they had no relation whatever to what had happened. So I began to perceive that anything written was fiction to various degrees. The whole subject – the difference between actuality and representation – was an interesting one. And that’s what brought me to literature in the first place.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don’t know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.