Simon Winchester Quotes

The great difference between voyages rests not with the ships, but with the people you meet on them.

I've lived a lot since I was 16, so I've got more things to write about. I've started playing around the world and met some great people along the way who've taught me lots of things.

In both business and personal life, I've always found that travel inspires me more than anything else I do. Evidence of the languages, cultures, scenery, food, and design sensibilities that I discover all over the world can be found in every piece of my jewelry.

But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well, have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in, of course, and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house; that was done many thousands of years ago.

When I began writing that I was able and did travel and met some fascinating people and also uncovered some history, which has not been discovered before.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

Because I've lived a risky and unconventional life, I don't often struggle for subjects to write about.

Imagine - four years you could have spent travelling around Europe meeting people, or going to the Far East of Africa or India, meeting people, exchanging ideas, reading all you wanted to anyway, and instead I wasted it at Roosevelt.

Traveling has a major impact on what I do, cause all over the world I'm meeting all kinds of people. And relationships is the second major impact that I have. I just enjoy the variety that the world has to offer.

I have an appreciation for everywhere I've been so far.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

It's important to travel and move and have a continual set of experiences so you've got more to feed back into your work. For me, it's a natural thing.

I write about all manner of things: a guy fighting aliens in the New York State Library, Antarctica, Inca civilization in Peru, the Great Pyramid at Giza, and people often ask me, where do I get these ideas from? They come from reading widely, watching a lot of documentaries, and increasingly, as I was able to, travelling around the world.

When you're traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I've met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

My work is my break. It takes me to different parts of the world, and I get to meet different people.

I have lived a crazy life since I was 16, have travelled the world, and met some amazing people. And if you can turn that into music, then you are doing something right.

I travel as much as I can and meet people.

A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.

I've met the most interesting people while flying or on a boat. These methods of travel seem to attract the kind of people I want to be with.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

Everything can be grist for the muse. Sometimes, writers draw on personal experiences. 'Ghoul' was just that.

The travel, the amazing work I have had the chance to do, the meetings with different people are all very inspiring and give me lots of positive energy.

I want to work; then, as my kids get older, I want to have adventures. I want to visit all their countries: learn and live inside all their cultures.

Ah! Young people, travel if you can, and if you cannot - travel all the same!

In order for me to write a scene, it's very important for me to see and experience everything with my own eyes, so yes, I was able to visit some remarkable houses and destinations while I was in China.