Simon Winchester Quotes

The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.

If I had not been coached well about how to deal with a culture and a set of values that were foreign to my own, I would not have been able to be successful.

I think that we in the West expect people to adapt to our culture very, very quickly when they come to our country. But when we go over to someone else's, I don't think we are willing to meet them halfway like we expect them to meet us. I think having cultural sensitivity is a lot more important than we realize.

The art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows.

When you travel you experience, in a very practical way, the act of rebirth. You confront completely new situations, the day passes more slowly, and on most journeys you don't even understand the language the people speak....You begin to be more accessible to others, because they may be able to help you in difficult situations.

I'm always amazed at how much people 'get' when I'm performing overseas. I've never had to change my act on my international shows; I just make sure that I've taken some time to get to know the people in those countries before I perform. That's been really useful.

Wear an Arab headcloth when with a tribe. Bedouin have a malignant prejudice against the hat, and believe the persistence in wearing it (due probably to British obstinacy of dictation) is founded on some immoral or irreligious principle…. if you can wear Arab kit when with the tribes, you will acquire their trust and intimacy to a degree impossible in uniform.

I think when you move to a country like the U.S., you need to understand the culture, to understand how people see the game, and adapt yourself.

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

I serve like a bridge. I go to other cultures, learn, put myself in different situations and learn as much as I can, and then go to Western cultures to give. I'm doing this bridging all the time.

One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.

Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.

Depended on the soldier. To relax, most of them put on headphones or played video games. Later in the war some of the younger officers began to read a lot of anthropology because they realized that the basic problem was that they were trying to fight a war in a culture they didn't understand. They might have read someone like Margaret Mead.

I had the interesting experience of having lived and worked for six years in China with Procter & Gamble, and that just changes, I think, your whole perspective in living overseas and living in a country like China.

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.

In the late 20th century, it became possible to travel between cultures, between the old world and the new, with great ease. So when you go back, you take the changed person with you who, in turn, changes things that otherwise might have stayed the same.

If you're playing with somebody from another idiom, you can't react to them in the same way that you react to somebody that is closer to your idiom. You don't fall into the same habits. You find a new way of communicating.

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

I say the same thing that I've said for decades now, which is: don't go over to Japan trying to change it, thinking that you know better. Go there trying to understand.

Travel early and travel often. Live abroad, if you can. Understand cultures other than your own. As your understanding of other cultures increases, your understanding of yourself and your own culture will increase exponentially.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

When you introduce something new to a country, you want to do it right. Generally, that means you have to do it yourself.

What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.