Danny Wallace Quotes

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

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.

I went through a phase when I was watching a lot of foreign films, just itching to get out of the suburbs and explore.

I spent my childhood all over the country. In certain parts where I grew up, films were this fantasy world.

When I was a kid, I always wanted to go to Europe, to go to Africa, to go traveling.

Traveling is a fool's paradise.

I'm a jet jockey and I've always escaped ever since I was a kid. I've always been a weekend type runaway person. Work hard, play hard type thing. It's not been a mid-life thing at all, it's been a habit because I think it changes your environment and how you feel even if it's for the day. It's a good thing.

Take a few minutes of every day to fantasize about how you would wander, travel, or explore if you could.

I hadn’t read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.

The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.

I’ve had that kind of experience myself: I’m looking at a map and I see someplace that makes me think, ‘I absolutely have to go to this place, no matter what’. And most of the time, for some reason, the place is far away and hard to get to. I feel this overwhelming desire to know what kind of scenery the place has, or what people are doing there. It’s like measles - you can’t show other people exactly where the passion comes from. It’s curiosity in the purest sense. An inexplicable inspiration.

Pretty much any place that I haven't been is the next place I definitely I want to go.

So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.

From the time I was a kid, I had a wanderlust. I always wanted to travel, in any form - plane, train, boat, car, motorcycle. So I think that if I ever do have a mid-life crisis, I have all the toys to refer to quickly.

Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year - or at least forty-five hours - and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand.

I always loved the idea of a spy movie and part of it came from my personal love of spy movies. It started when I was growing up as a little kid in the 60s.

I think I always wanted to have adventures in my life. I was always kind of a rambunctious kid.

I hate everything about traveling but I love to explore new locations so I wish I could snap and arrive somewhere whenever the need or impulse would arise.

As a youngster I was a great dreamer, reading many books of adventure and walking lonely miles with my head in the clouds.

I have friends who have a normal family, kids and a dog, and I think I would blow my brains out. It's fine for them. But I'm such a free spirit, I feel more alive when I've got somewhere to go.

I'd love to travel more. I really look forward to traveling with my kids. I'm just waiting for them to want to travel with me.

People are attracted to your light because they want it for themselves. It's like fireflies. When we were kids in New York, we would visit my dad and catch fireflies because we were so attracted to their light. Put them in jars next to our bed, and then they'd die. Then we'd go out the next night and get another firefly. That's how people are.

Everything I pick up seems to lure me away. Everything I do in my daily life begins to feel like striking wet matches. The need to travel is a mysterious force. A desire to 'go' runs through me equally with an intense desire to 'stay' at home. An equal and opposite thermodynamic principle. When I travel, I think of home and what it means. At home I'm dreaming of catching trains at night in the gray light of Old Europe, or pushing open shutters to see Florence awaken. The balance just slightly tips in the direction of the airport.

What induces you, oh man, to depart from your home in town, to leave parents and friends, and go to the countryside over mountains and valleys, if it is not for the beauty of the world of nature?

Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything, without anguish, death, winter waiting along it with their eyes open through the dew.