320 Quotes About Travel-writing

...how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.

We depend on this give-and-take when living abroad. You can’t exile yourself from your homeland and not always feel that tidal pull of return. Those minor details, the commercial jingles and pop songs, the chain restaurants and decade-defining shades of our blue jeans, are details you don’t even think about until you are face-to-face with a society that has very little to do with your own. Suddenly those one-hit wonders become a secret language, the very vestige of American culture.

Driving down deserted early morning roads. Round and round. Round downtown. Through naked streets. Lips pursed on two litre bottles of beer, but pursuing the lips of freedom's night. Swapping cars. Winding up at karaoke bars or Bolsi- the best place in town. For the food. For the folk. For the service. For the crema de papaya. And for that late night dawn's whiskey coffee.

People add color to their story because they think it happened in black and white.

Being the Novelist-in-Residence at a riad hotel in the kasbah of an Arabic North African city is a lot like trying to write one’s memoirs on shreds of napkins in a nuthouse.

You have to taste a culture to understand it.

It was one of those striking moments in life where you find familiarity in the inexplicable.

My professional life had started and here I was at a professional dinner full of uninhibited drinking.

Somehow, we were passing the boundaries of language and finding clarity in shared thought, even if we were just talking about beer!