When you're traveling, you are what you are, right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.

Somewhere lives a bad Cajun cook, just as somewhere must live one last ivory-billed woodpecker. For me, I don't expect ever to encounter either one.

Be careful going in search of adventure - it's ridiculously easy to find.

Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while.

Beware thoughts that come in the night.

...who can say where a voyage starts - not the the actual passage but the dream of a journey and its urge to find a way?

A true journey, no matter how long the travel takes, has no end.

Without the errors, wrong turns and blind alleys, without the doubling back and misdirection and fumbling and chance discoveries, there was not one bit of joy in walking the labyrinth.

On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing.

The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one's self a fool.

I can't say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn't known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know.

...sometimes offering a quality daily opinion about what’s going on in American politics feels like trying to compose a beautiful symphony using only the recorded screams of psychiatric patients.

Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.

A classic is read not to enjoy but only to be boast about it.

Perhaps I should be flattered that somebody imagines the name is worth so much, especially since my parents gave me the same name 42 years ago for free.

Whoever we are here, we might be princesses somewhere else. Or writers. Or scientists. Or presidents. Or whatever the hell we want to be that everyone else says we can't.

I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.

Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.

If you do good work for good clients, it will lead to other good work for other good clients. If you do bad work for bad clients, it will lead to other bad work for other bad clients.

It's really something for people who are approaching 30 to take a look at what that means to them. I think turning 30 is a chance to re-identify with yourself.

Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skilled manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which they cannot predict.