John Fusco Quotes

It all goes back to 'Wow, I never knew this about Marco Polo.' This is an incredible story and an incredible character, and such a rich world of Mongolian and Chinese culture.

It always circled back around to Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. That always fascinated me because so few people make the connection between the two.

I feel like we are reintroducing historical figures, with the explorer Marco Polo and the grandson of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, the ruler of the Mongol empire, the trading place that everybody wanted to get involved in.

He was an Italian kid traveling in China, and I'm of Italian decent with a fascination for China. So, I always felt this connection to him and lived vicariously through the travels of Marco Polo.

I grew up with a fascination with Marco Polo. I had this unlikely interest in the East as a young man, and you can't really read about Chinese history and philosophy without encountering him at every turn.

When people hear the name 'Marco Polo,' they tend to think of a map or explorer. Very few people know the true story of Marco Polo, and it's so much more compelling and exciting than the mythology.

Marco Polo has been kind of buried under this cloud of rather banal historical dust, when the true story is so much more exciting.

The journey of Marco Polo is the hero's journey, one that all cultures across the globe can relate to.

Khan let Polo be his eyes and ears. He was the first one to build a bridge between East and West.

From an early age I was very, very fascinated by uncertainty.

I could do one show after another in China for the rest of my life and still die ignorant. There's a lot of places left to go.

The European who comes to America plunges into the virgin forest with wonder and delight; while the American who goes to Europe finds his greatest pleasure, at first, in hunting up the memorials of the past. Each is in quest of novelty, and is burning with the desire to gaze at objects of which he has often read.

So, you know, I think the age of exploration is just beginning, not ending, on our planet.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.

In my teens I was interested in photography. Then I decided that I should learn something about the world of commerce. And I came to America at age 17 to escape Europe. I went to NYU - nothing better than being 17 years old and coming to New York.

In 2007, I did a horseback trip across part of central Mongolia with my 13-year-old son - we encountered Marco Polo at all these historical places where Mongolian nomads would reference his accounts and his relationship with Kublai Khan.

I'm a little like Marco Polo, going around and mixing cultures.

Great storytellers in the past would go to an unknown land and return to tell the stories they've found. Those were also journeys into their inner psyches and that's still true today. An actor, a writer, does that as if saying, 'Here's what I've discovered about myself and about the world I'm in. I would like to share this with you.'

John Kerry had a very vivid imagination as a young person. I mean, he actually did go and take his bicycle from Norway to go camp in Sherwood Forest to be around the ghost of Robin Hood.

I've traveled around the world.

Something about exploration has fascinated me from a young age.

I like new experiences. It's one of the reasons I went to China.

When your dad comes back from a faraway land with bows and arrows and spears wrapped up in a carpet... that's cool.

Yes, I'm a fan, and 'The Lost City of Z' has been my inspiration. Percy Fawcett was one of my heroes, and I loved the book and the film. I was lost in the same area that Fawcett had explored, and I can identify with his sense of passion and obsession, and I definitely see the romance in searching for lost treasure.

Books of exploration have always fascinated me, like somebody going up the Amazon for the first time.