Dave Barry Quotes

I don't much like Singapore. It's very big, very modern and very urbanised. As a rule, I prefer older places where you get a sense of the history.

I don't think I'll travel anymore. Travel is nothing but an inconvenience. There is always enough trouble where you are.

When we got off the streetcar at Times Square, it was somewhat of a letdown. Newspapers were blowing about the road and pavement, and Broadway looked seedy, like a slovenly woman just out of bed.

The fact that Americans drag around the world by the busloads to glimpse the past probably has something to do with the youth of our country. We revere anything older than George Burns.

Pompeii is an extraordinary place to be because it was preserved exactly as it was. There are many other sites. If you visit any other antiquity-type sites throughout the world, they're very damaged with what's gone on over the centuries since they were abandoned. But this one was just, like, sealed, so you're looking at rock surfaces and the carving of letters and names in the stones looks like it was done yesterday.

All of a sudden, I feel very old and very tired. Maybe when I get to California, the smog, brush fires, floods, and earthquakes will cheer me up.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

Societies need heroes. So we travel to places where the revisionists cannot dismantle the great.

I am a keen medievalist and like going around museums and ruins and finding out about the people and local culture. I'm not one for sitting by a pool or lying on a beach. I also like to sketch while I'm on holiday, if I have time.

As for pictures and museums, that don't trouble me. The worst of going abroad is that you've always got to look at things of that sort. To have to do it at home would be beyond a joke.

When we find something new at Giza, we announce it to the world. The Sphinx and the Pyramids are world treasures. We are the guardian's of these treasures, but they belong to the world.

I soon found law school an unmitigated bore.

I spent most of the '60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey. These are countries where the ancient past is interfused with the daily present, and I remember being struck with wonder at the constant sense of continuity and connection, the reminders that lie in wait for you at every turn.

An important part of what the state does is preserving its history.

I don't want to be cliched, but Buckingham Palace is beautiful, and the old red telephone booths are really interesting to me. I've always wanted to see those.

Ancient monuments 300 to 1000-plus years old are never 'renovated,' only 'restored,' a distinction that escapes the babus.

Sean is so funny. One time he went to Ireland for two weeks with his mother, and Ireland is so beautiful, and he got back; we were like, 'How was it?' and he was like, 'Ugh I was so bored.'

I want to bring forth the historical significance of Sreerampur and turn it into a tourism hub.

I want the Dead Sea, like Masada, to be part of UNESCO's world heritage.

I love the South Bank: every era of architecture is there, and you can stop, look, and listen.

I went through a period of being disillusioned with touring.

Our first stop was red square, the heart of Moscow - if Moscow has one.

It may just be because I get homesick, but I have concluded Washington's cherry blossoms are just plain overrated.

At Birkin Grif's left, his seat insecure on a scruffy packhorse, Theomeris Glyn, his only armour a steel-stressed leather cap, grumbled at the cold and the earliness of the hour, and cursed the flint hearts of city girls.

Spending all my remaining money on a ticket to Florence was rendered needlessly complicated by the fact that none of the ticket-sellers had ever heard of the place. At last their supervisor showed up and set them straight by informing them that the city they had always referred to as 'Firenze' was in reality called Florence.