James Fenimore Cooper Quotes

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

I don't believe in writing anything that I don't know about or haven't researched about personally. I like to transport the reader to places, and in order to do that I have to do the research.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading.

Good travel books are novels at heart.

You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.

Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.

The summer I finished my first novel 'Ghana Must Go,' I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lome to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.

I am influenced by books which don't have their eye on the endgame, but which try to be entertaining on each and every page.

I just don't see myself as a travel writer. I can't. I don't.

The funny thing about writing is, although you are writing about an experience which only you have had, you are trying to welcome other people into it, and there are ways I think of doing this, and one of them is through the senses, through the sounds and the smells.

The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story.

Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.

I say that glorious prose is a fine and laudable thing, but without an enthralling story, it's just so much verbal tapioca. Simply put, the best books have both, and the best writers disparage neither.

Without any intended hubris, I've lead a pretty exciting life. What I've tried to do in Mission Compromised is draw on those experiences to create a sense of excitement and realism within the story.

I wrote about my journey through the country of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature.

When I'm on an adventure, I live with a camera in my hand, and that's what I try to give to the readers inside the space that gives us every chapter of the story.

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.

For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.

A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

You know, I've always wanted to be a young Charles Kuralt. I started in this business with just a Winnebago and a dream.

Book after book, I get hooked, every time the writer talks to me like a friend.

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.