Said Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux, the notoriously cranky travel writer, offers this observation in his new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star:

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing time.

Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude on other people’s privacy — being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders.

The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological.”