I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it's how I earned a living.
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.
Michael Palin decided to give up on his considerable comedy talents to make those dreadfully tedious travel shows. Have you ever tried to watch one?
I always like to arrive at the airport early to enjoy breakfast and lounge about so that when I get on the plane all my travel fever has disappeared.
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
I was in the studio so much, it was about the search for air in a metaphoric sense, and the breathing has more to do with travel for me, about the search musically for open air.
All this misjudgment that we have of each other is based on ignorance. The second you get to travel, you see that human beings, no matter where they come from, they are the same.
It's true that immigrant novels have to do with people going from one country to another, but there isn't a single novel that doesn't travel from one place to another, emotionally or locally.
I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.
Growing up in the '60s and early '70s, with the space flight and the Apollo program, I always loved planes. I always loved rockets and I always loved space travel.
Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong Kong.
I was a very bad accountant; I didn't care about money, golf or discovering fraud. After about a year I was sacked; then I went into teacher training.
Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.
The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it - oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible.
It seems like a lot of people seek their peace in things. And most of us are not even satisfied with the things we have... we always want more.
'Charm' - which means the power to effect work without employing brute force - is indispensable to women. Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm.
But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is no longer constrained by the price of paper.
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
The national security state has many unfair and cruel weapons in its arsenal, but that of junk science is one which can be fought and perhaps defeated.
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
All of science to me, everything that we have learned, is important to the extent that it brings us to our senses.
