Theophile Gautier Quotes

I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.

I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time.

I'd waste a holiday trying to set a story in this new place I'd visit, whereas I would never write a story about Indianapolis.

I'm a traveler and a vagabond and an observer, and the songs come through that. And that's just the way it's going to be.

Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.

...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?

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.

There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go.

It's true to say that once I've got the bare bones of a story, I often get ideas from my own research trips to faraway places.

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

I can write most places. I particularly like writing on trains. Being between places is quite liberating, and looking out of the window, watching a procession of landscapes and random-ish objects, is very good for stories.

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

The fact that people will pay you to talk to people and travel to interesting places and write about what intrigues you, I am just amazed by that.

I don't like to travel. Yet all my books seem to involve a journey.

I've been a traveller, but I don't travel so much now. I'm trying to do it vicariously through my writing. I'm trying to write books that will draw readers away from their lives but send them back in a more awakened way.

Nothing much interested me other than playing with language and telling stories and doing something with the wonders of the world around me.

People can't see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler.

Writing an essay is like a school assignment: I have my topic, I organize my thoughts, and I write it. I have complete control over what I'm doing. Writing a novel is like setting out on a journey without knowing who or what I'll encounter, how long it's going to take, or where I'm going to end up.

I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

I'm not like J.K. Rowling, where I know there's going to be this number of seasons, and I know exactly what's going to happen. I would be so bored if that was the case. There would be no journey. There would be nothing to discover.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.