While writing 'Cold Mountain,' I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it, though, was an imagined map of the landscape Jack travels in the southern Appalachian folktales. ...
I don't really like long flights any more - I find them too tiring. Flying always involves the same things these days - huge crowds at airports, waiting around, late take-offs, weather problems, and so on. I don't really enjoy travelling. I don't ima...
Traveling as much as I do, I get lonely sometimes. I have friends now in cities all over the world, so I get to be social, but it's hard to have the deep meaningful relationships, especially an intimate one. With my guy friends, I can show up once a ...
I'm inspired by the people I meet in my travels--hearing their stories, seeing the hardships they overcome, their fundamental optimism and decency. I'm inspired by the love people have for their children. And I'm inspired by my own children, how full...
I remember as a little girl going down to the beet fields in the Dakotas and in Nebraska and Wyoming as migrant workers when I was very, very small, like, I was, like, 5 years old, I believe. And I remember going out there, you know, traveling to the...
Sometimes you have to let go a little bit and travel the path of least resistance but this doesn’t mean that you quit when things get tough, as you are working towards a goal! It just means that you may only be able to see a rough draft of your fin...
I'm a fan of meeting readers face to face, at reader events, where we're able to sit down and take some time to talk. Too often, at regular book signings, I meet readers who have traveled six or eight hours to see me, and I'm unable to spend more tha...
I live in Manhattan but travel all around the world; I moved to Paris when I was 16; I lived in London twice. It's kind of like, if I want to move somewhere, I don't have anything holding me back. I don't have children. If I wanna live in a certain p...
You couldn't get me to go travel around and sit in a hotel room again. I have no interest in doing that. So everybody's happy. I am, at 74. Some people like doing it, but I never was much for that, anyway. It's a lot of work. So the only thing I miss...
When I travel with my kids abroad, I am not myself, but I'm more a father who wants to protect them. Sometimes, I am even aggressive about certain things and get surprised seeing myself like that: for instance, when people want to take pictures of th...
[Of Victor Laszlo, who wants to escape from Casablanca] Captain Renault: No matter how clever he is, he still needs an exit visa... or I should say two? Rick: Why two? Captain Renault: He is traveling with a lady. Rick: He'll take one. Captain Renaul...
My parents being Bengali, we always had music in our house. My nani was a trained classical singer, who taught my mum, who, in turn, was my first teacher. Later I would travel almost 70 kms to the nearest town, Kota, to learn music from my guru Mahes...
My journey began with a single pencil. While traveling through India in 2006, I asked a boy begging on the streets, 'If you could have anything in the world, what would you want?' and he answered me with two words: 'A pencil.' Luckily, I had one in m...
If real, regular, normal, boring life, (when you're at home every day, seeing the same people, doing the same things) is like sitting at home on the floor surrounded by toys... traveling feels to me like going to Toys R Us with your toy box and getti...
Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous activities, but see that your soul remains your own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, somewhere w...
No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretc...
Traveling together into what the poet Adrienne Rich has called ‘the cratered night of female memory,’ they undertook a shared process of self-discovery, working together to probe the possibility of woman’s creative power. Through their explorat...
Some poets travel to distant lands and bring back exotic sights and smells. But others go to witness turmoil or violence, to be at the center of political or social change and to bring back the news — not as journalists do, but shaped through langu...
Here's what I love about travel: strangers get a chance to amaze you. Sometimes a single day can bring a blooming surprise, a simple kindness that opens a chink in the brittle shell of your heart and makes you a different person when you go to sleep-...
But that’s the wonderful thing about foreign travel, suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most basic sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross the street without endangering your life. ...
Hay días en que pienso que ser de izquierdas es una especie de facultad, como la memoria. Todos la tenemos en estado de latencia. Si no la usas nunca, te mueres sin enterarte de que la tenías. La prueba de que está ahí, sin embargo, es que en det...