Esther Dyson Quotes

If I want to experience the life of an ordinary person, I cannot do it in Asia.

You always see a better side of where you're visiting when a local shows you around.

However hard you might try, you can never understand a market like a local person would.

Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't.

I've been visiting Thailand for more than 20 years but didn't fall in love with it until I visited Phuket Town in Phuket. The northern part of Phuket is one of the most fascinating places I've ever been, and largely unspoilt and unknown.

There are two worlds: the world of the tourist and the world of everyone else. Often they're side by side. But the tourist doesn't actually see how people live.

The sheeplike nature of travel - being on a beach with thousands of other people is not my idea of fun. I also don't like being a tourist because you don't know what's really going on in a country.

You can learn a lot when you play in a little town in Holland or Western Australia, and you learn different things than you would learn playing a big city.

When I'm in a foreign city, I like to get to know it like a local.

At Al Jazeera, we are getting our local Somalis, Yemenis and Sudanese, local correspondents from within the society, who understand much better than the people who come from overseas. We will get a much better insight.

Get off the beaten path... If you want to find those mom-and-pop joints, those funky little places, just ask around.

But London is my favourite city as I've walked the streets of the capital so often, I know it really well.

Most people when they go to Vegas want to go to places on the Strip and experience the big names. Actually in Las Vegas, I find the best restaurants are off the Strip.

The ridiculous events in everyday life are often overlooked - people don't recognise it as potentially cinematic.

Pico Union is an underrated part of L.A., and not a lot of people go unless you live there.

You can't make a good show based on pure verisimilitude, pure anti-drama. But you have to acknowledge a lot of ordinary life. Most TV doesn't do that.

A 'truth' detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen-and then in bed, of course.

...the great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's backyard.

I like to say that my mother had a very ordinary life. From the outside it didn't look like there was anything particularly special or wonderful about it, but when you watch somebody hold on to that life with both hands, it makes you think that life must be pretty damn good.

This isn't a Christmas special! This is my life. In the real world, miracles and goodness just don't happen.

It's very nice to be a sort of normal person for once; I think it's about as normal as I'm going to get.

Time stands still best in moments that look suspiciously like ordinary life.

before one actually visits them, everyone tends to think of their favorite countries as one grand Disneyland filled with national monuments and historical treasures conveniently laid out for easy viewing, when what they really are filled with, of course, is people going to work, laundromats and places to buy rat poison.

I am interested in the non-dramatic moments in life. I'm not at all attracted to making films that are about drama. A few years back, I saw a biopic about a famous American abstract expressionist artist. And you know what? It really horrified me.

Every day, we try to pretend that we haven't perceived that moment, that it doesn't exist; that today is the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention to their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment.