A Quote by Phil Cousineau
Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places, spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafes . . . all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, shooting free-throws, or meditating.
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Unlike many travel books I didn't set out to travel with the idea of writing a book in mind.
Through his long, productive career, Paul Theroux has mixed nonfiction books about exotic travel with novels set in exotic places. Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras - he lives in and writes about places most of us never see.
Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things.
I love to read. I wish I could advise more people to read. There’s a whole new world in books. If you can’t afford to travel, you travel mentally through reading. You can see anything and go any place you want to in reading.
Novels set in distant places give us expectations not unlike those we have of travel writing, and often the distinctions are blurred, as in, say, the way the low life of Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward is depicted in John David Morley's recent 'Pictures from the Water Trade.'
I have my own set of survival techniques. I am patient. I know how to pack light. But my one might travel talent is that I can make friends with anybody. I can make friends with the dead. If there isn’t anyone else around to talk to, I could probably make friends with a four-foot-tall pile of sheetrock. That is why I’m not afraid to travel to the most remote places in the world, not if there are human beings there to meet. People asked me before I left, “do you have friends [there]?’ and I would just shake my head no, thinking to myself, But I will.
I fear that I can no longer travel without technology. Twenty years ago, I loved getting on a bus in West Africa and taking off for a city I'd never been to before, relying on advice from out-of-date travel books and fellow passengers on the bus. Now, I end up using TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google Maps. I probably eat and sleep better when I'm on the road, but I miss the mystery of travel when it was more random and unpredictable.
Reading was my only escape from reality. Through books, I could be whoever I wanted. I could fall in love with the handsome prince, travel to exotic places, and take the leap that almost always had a happy ending.
What is it about maps and globes that seems to require our undivided attention? I've spent hours looking at maps of places I will never see and maps so old that they are a record of nothing but the faintest glow of the past. Perhaps they turn us into gods, letting us look down at the insignificant drones that occupy the earth. Or maybe they simply feed off our hunger to go off into the unknown. Venturing off to places where people don't chain themselves to tedious jobs and financial debts but places of imagination, mystery and freedom Perhaps they're just trying to tell us something.
Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.
Our singer, Matt, was reading Stephen Hawking and other physics-related books, and I was reading entrepreneurial books, and we all started discussing the new technologies that were taking over the world, from 3-D printing to space travel. These conversations starting leading us to think of how we could portray these things in a musical way.
'Britain's Got Talent' just gave me that platform that I needed to share that with the world and be recognized, and now I'm able to travel the world and sing my music in places I never thought I'd visit - Dubai, Mexico, Brazil, so many different places.
My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.
I like to think that if it hadn't gone as well as it has, if I wasn't able to make a living off of playing music, I would still be playing the music. But, of course, I wouldn't likely have had the opportunity to travel, and a lot of the places have inspired songs.
Books are great, but travel is the greatest teacher. If you have a choice, choose to travel. Not everywhere you go will be wonderful and life-altering; in fact, some places may underwhelm you and that, too, is an experience.
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