Jan Morris Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

Tourism encourages unreality. It's easier in the tourist context to be unreal than real. It's the easiest thing in the world to buy a funny old Welsh hat and pop it on and sit outside selling rock [a very sweet candy] in some bogus tavern. It's much easier than being real, contemporary. Tourism encourages and abets this sham-ness wherever it touches. I detest it.

Jan Morris
Basque is one of the world's more alarming languages. Only a handful of adult foreigners, they say, have ever managed to learn it. The Devil tried once and mastered only three words — profanities, I assume.

Jan Morris
I generally travel alone, but sometimes with my partner, with whom I've lived for forty years. But dearly though I love her, if I'm going to be working I find I'm better on my own. Love is rather inhibiting in my view.

Jan Morris
I've become obsessed with the idea of reconciliation, particularly reconciliation with nature but with people too, of course. I think that travel has been a kind of search for that, a pursuit for unity and even an attempt to contribute to a sense of unity.

Jan Morris
The tragedy of the Soviet Union was that it marked the decline of an ideological empire. The British Empire really had no ideology, except one that had evolved by a kind of rule of thumb, changing as it went along.

Jan Morris
There is always a sneer in Las Vegas. The mountains around it sneer. The desert sneers. And arrogant in the middle of its wide valley, dominating those diligent sprawling suburbs, the downtown city sneers like anything.

Jan Morris
The British had been absolutely shattered by two world wars. The first one left the empire physically larger than ever before. The second one was an obvious death knell for it.

Jan Morris
Say farewell to the trumpets!
You will hear them no more.
But their sweet sad silvery echoes
Will call to you still
Through the half-closed door.

Jan Morris
To be writing about a place you've got to be utterly selfish. You've only got to think about the place that you're writing. Your antenna must be out all the time picking up vibrations and details. If you've got somebody with you, especially somebody you're fond of, it doesn't work so well.

Jan Morris