Bruce Chatwin
Bruce Chatwin
Charles Bruce Chatwinwas an English travel writer, novelist, and journalist. His first book, In Patagonia, established Chatwin as a travel writer, although he considered himself instead a storyteller, interested in bringing to light unusual tales. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hilland his novel Utzwas shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2008 The Times named Chatwin #46 on their list of "50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945."...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 May 1940
As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.
Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.
A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, towards the end of his journey, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will.
If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.
Because they knew each other's thoughts, they even quarrelled without speaking.
And when you look along the way we've come, there are spirals of vultures wheeling.
The song and the land are one.
As you go along, you literally collect places. I'm fed up with going to places; I shan't go to anymore.
Music… is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.
I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.
When people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough.
Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.
Tyranny sets up its own echo-chamber.
Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.