Quote

I have always been fascinated with those who try to look over the horizon and see things that are coming at us.

There are people who travel because they want to push themselves to physical limits, people who walk across deserts or cycle across the Antarctic - like Ranulph Fiennes, who just does it because it's there. And then there are people like me, who are just genuinely curious about the world.

People who don't travel cannot have a global view, all they see is what's in front of them. Those people cannot accept new things because all they know is where they live.

I am interested in the notion that people can become so obsessed by their world that they lose sense and awareness of how they appear to other people. They're so earnest about it. But that's true of so many things.

I have met some very strange people and some very strange cats - and I'm not talking about jazz greats. I'm talking about animals that people claim have come from outer space, and boy, they're weird!

People have the illusion that all over the world, all the time, all kinds of fantastic things are happening. When in fact, over most of the world, most of the time, nothing is happening.

It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.