Jonathan Raban Quotes

In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air.

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.

Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted.