John Curran Quotes

I've had fantasies in the past of walking across America or some great distance, but it's such a commitment of time that it's stopped me.

As we've lost this idea of pilgrimage, we've lost this idea of human beings walking for a very, very long time. It does change you.

My three-year ride by horse from Mongolia to Hungary was the most difficult, most revealing, and interesting of any of my travels. Travelling by horse, you're far more engaged and dependent on the land and other people than by any other means.

I respect anyone who could take a stagecoach ride from the East Coast to the West. You had to be a very special kind of person to survive that because it's the most uncomfortable ride in the world.

You can't replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it.

At age 22 I set what I insist is an all-time record for distance hitchhiking in Bermuda shorts: 3,700 miles in three weeks.

Working on my first novel, 'Groundswell' - about a woman recovering from a bad breakup who falls in love with surfing - I spent a month south of the border. And when I wasn't writing or surfing, I was eating. A lot.

In the Sixties, there were no guidebooks to Asia, at least none that suited young shoestring travelers. No one on the hippie highway carried a copy of Fodor's 'Islamic Asia.' The route to spiritual enlightenment wasn't revealed in the pages of the latest Baedeker. Intrepids were on a journey of spontaneity and reinvention.

I go to the wild mountains where I am responsible for myself. Step by step I am making sure that I don't die.

I've been on camels before, lumbering slowly through the desert - not hugely exciting, but I enjoyed the 'Lawrence of Arabia' vibe.

Alpinism means you go by yourself with your own responsibility, knowing that you could die. But Everest now is more like ski tourism: preparing the piste, helping people go up, setting oxygen bottles near the summit.

I'd quite like to run the Great Wall of China. I've never been to China and there's something about the Great Wall of China that is so iconic and evocative. It's only 3,000 miles. It's not that far.

I want to go to a country where I don't speak the language. I want to be lost in translation.

I spent about a year traveling overland from Egypt through Sudan and Ethiopia, and eventually into East Africa.

I thought I would come to Australia and learn to surf. Instead, I learned to walk.

Travel means growth. You have to see something new. You have to grow. You can't grow in the same place. Travel takes the edge off and you are thrust into a new environment where you are forced to survive and to learn the language.

You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school.

The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.

Texas liberals are the camels of good news. We can cross entire deserts between oases.

The mere animal pleasure of travelling in a wild unexplored country is also great. The effect of travel on a man whose heart is in the right place is that the mind is made more self-reliant: it becomes more confident of its own resources, there is greater presence of mind.

When you've parked the second car in the garage, and installed the hot tub, and skied in Colorado, and wind-surfed in the Caribbean, when you've had your first love affair and your second and your third, the question will remain, where does the dream end for me?

I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin.

Joy makes the longest journey too short.

It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself.