Good travel books, like travel itself, open the door to new worlds. In the strongest works the author's vision becomes our own, especially if his or her subject is a distant destination.
Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining, where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose.
Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.
Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.
Unlike many travel books I didn't set out to travel with the idea of writing a book in mind.
There's something so satisfying about road trip movies - and books!
Good travel books are novels at heart.
I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.
Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things.
