Colum McCann Quotes

I once rode a motorcycle across Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco!

I'm from Texas. I hitchhiked to Tennessee when I was 19 years old, and it is really beautiful in Tennessee.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?

I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush.

I tour as many countries as possible, and I've toured every state in America, plus every province in Canada.

For women, my best travel tip is to invest in two to three cashmere ponchos. I buy the brand Minnie Rose. They're good cover in three seasons, and they make wonderful travel blankets.

Travel like a pro, not like a hobo. That's my motto.

I spent the first seven years of my life in a caravan traveling around Europe and the United States because my parents were just obsessed with traveling.

I love traveling. I like to keep moving. I love the big open spaces in America.

Everything good is on the highway.

Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me.

Surfing and climbing are both useless sports. You get to be conquistadors of the useless. You climb to the summit and there is nothing there. And you could hike to the top from another direction. How you get there is the important part. It's the same with surfing.

Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.

I always wanted to travel around and see lots of America, I'd never been to Boston, I'd never been to San Francisco even, so I'm quite excited to just go the places.

If I had the chance to spend a day with Werner Herzog, I would want there to be a canoe involved. I want to be down in Patagonia or something, and kill some kind of wild beast and skin it and gut it and cook it. And then turn its fur into some kind of layer of warmth. And then trek through the hills.

I had the radio on, I was driving. Trees flew by, me and Del were singing, Little Runaway, I was flying.

Got my Allman Brothers cassettes stacked up on the dash, got some Jack back in the trunk and a tank full of gas.

I followed those highway signs and I've run down those thin white lines.

You must not try to be too pure, you must fly closer to the sea.

I know a lot of people who are philosophers and they sit by the river and talk about what that underwater world might look like. And I'll say 'Dive in, man, and go see it. Swim around. You'll be okay.

Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour - but in face I am that kind of person.

And off we go, out onto the highway looking for a little fun. Perhaps a flatbed truck loaded with human cadavers will explode in front of a Star Trek reunion. One can only dream and hope.

A mountain you're plannin' on climbin' ain't the same as the one you ain't. It ain't so pretty.

I like to move around. I travel. I've driven across country by myself.