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I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual.

Jan Morris

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Jan Morris
Age: 94 †
Born: 1926
Born: October 2
Died: 2020
Died: November 20
Author
Historian
Journalist
Clevedon
Somerset
Factual
Resist
Travel
Idea
Ideas
Writing

More quotes by Jan Morris

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Vermonters, it seems to me, are like ethnics in their own land. They are exceedingly conscious of their difference from other Americans, and they talk a great deal about outsiders, newcomers, and people from the south.
Jan Morris
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Chicago's downtown seems to me to constitute, all in all, the best-looking twentieth-century city, the city where contemporary technique has best been matched by artistry, intelligence, and comparatively moderated greed. No doubt about it, if style were the one gauge, Chicago would be among the greatest of all the cities of the world.
Jan Morris
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Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell.
Jan Morris
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Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.
Jan Morris
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I was born with the wrong body, being feminine by gender but male by sex, and I could achieve completeness only when the one was adjusted to the other.
Jan Morris
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I am when the Chinese, who know everything, build a house, they consult the precepts of an ancient science, Feng Shui, which tells them exactly how, when, and where the work must be done, and so brings good fortune to the home forever.
Jan Morris
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There are only two rules. One is E. M. Forster's guide to Alexandria the best way to know Alexandria is to wander aimlessly. The second is from the Psalms grin like a dog and run about through the city.
Jan Morris
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the personality of St. John's, Newfoundland, hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.
Jan Morris
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To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music.
Jan Morris
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I know well the delectable thrill of moving into a new house somewhere altogether else, in somebody else’s county, where the climate is different, the food is different, the light is different, where the mundane preoccupations of life at home don’t seem to apply and it is even fun to go shopping.
Jan Morris
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I half cherish the hope that the end of history will be Swissness.
Jan Morris
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The city bursts with ideas as with traffic, a swirl of newness and surprise. Who can be bored in a city? If you are tired of one activity you can try something else, change your job, take your custom to another restaurant.
Jan Morris
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Vermonters are not only charmless of manner, on the whole they are also, as far as I can judge, utterly without pretence, and give the salutary impression that they don't care ten cents whether you are amused, affronted, intrigued, or bored stiff by them. Hardly anybody asked me how I liked Vermont. Not a soul said 'Have a nice day!
Jan Morris
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To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.
Jan Morris
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As to sex, the original pleasure, I cannot recommend too highly the advantages of androgyny.
Jan Morris
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[Travel seems] not just a way of having a good time, but something that every self-respecting citizen ought to undertake, like a high-fiber diet, say, or a deodorant.
Jan Morris
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I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.
Jan Morris
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Indians love to reduce the prosaic to the mystic.
Jan Morris
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It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest.
Jan Morris
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Was there ever a name more full of purpose than Chicago's? ... spoken as Chicagoans themselves speak it, with a bit of a spit to give heft to its slither, it is gloriously onomatopoetic.
Jan Morris