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
Because they knew each other's thoughts, they even quarrelled without speaking.
I haven't got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other god.
Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the things of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. We give our children guns and computer games, Wendy said. They gave their children the land.
I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.
Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.
Travel doesn't merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind.
To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe
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.
And when you look along the way we've come, there are spirals of vultures wheeling.
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.