The long and tedious labour of preparing this book for the press leaves me with the conviction that it is much easier to hunt gorillas than to write about them—to explore new countries than to describe them. During the twenty months which I have passed in the process of writing out my journals since my return to the United States, I have often wished myself back in the African wilds. I can only think that the reader, when he closes the book, will not think this labour wasted.
—Preface,
Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa
(1861); these lines were probably inspired by Livingstone (see above), whom he acknowledges in the text of his book
ANTHONY TROLLOPE ON HOW HE WROTE THE WEST INDIES AND THE SPANISH MAIN:"PREPARATION ... THERE WAS NONE"
Preparation, indeed, there was none. The descriptions and opinions came hot on the paper from their causes. I will not say that this is the best way of writing a book intended to give accurate information. But it is the best way of producing to the eye of the reader, and to his ear, that which the eye of the writer has seen and his ear heard.
—quoted in James Pope-Hennessy,
Anthony Trollope
(1971)
MARK TWAIN ON ROUGHING IT: "VARIEGATED VAGABONDIZING"
This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science. Still, there is information in the volume; information concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in person, and saw the happenings of the time with their own eyes. I allude to the rise, growth and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada—a curious episode, in some respects; the only one, of its peculiar kind, that has occurred in the land; and the only one, indeed, that is likely to occur in it.
Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped: information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious attar of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be. The more I call up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom. Therefore, I can only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not justification.
—
Roughing It
(1872)
JOHN STEINBECK ON TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY:" ANT-HILL ACTIVITY"
It's a formless, shapeless, aimless thing and it is even pointless. For this reason it may be the sharpest realism, because what I see around me is aimless and pointless—ant-hill activity.
—letter, July 1961, in
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
(1975)
VALERIAN ALBANOV ON HIS ARCTIC DEATH MARCH: "I SEE THIS DIARY ... THROUGH A VEIL"
Fog all day long, with that dull light that makes one's eyes so terribly painful. At the moment mine hurt so much that I see this diary only as through a veil, and hot tears run down my cheeks. From time to time I have to stop writing and bury my head in my
malitsa
[a heavy, sacklike reindeer-hide sleeping bag]. Only in complete darkness does the pain gradually abate, allowing me to open my eyes again.
—
In the Land of White Death
(1917), first published in English in 2000, translated by Alison Anderson
APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD: "I NEVER MEANT TO WRITE A BOOK"
When I went South I never meant to write a book: I rather despised those who did so as being of an inferior brand to those who did things and said nothing about them. But that they say nothing is too often due to the fact that they have nothing to say, or are too idle or too busy to learn how to say it. Everyone who has been through such an extraordinary experience has much to say if he has any faculty that way.
—Preface,
The Worst Journey in the World
(1923)
D. H. LAWRENCE: "MAKING LITTLE MARKS ON PAPER"
One says Mexico: one means, after all, one little town away South in the Republic: and in this little town, one rather crumbly adobe house built round two sides of a garden patio: and of this house, one spot on the deep shady veranda facing inwards to the trees, where there are an onyx table and three rocking chairs and one little wooden chair, a pot with carnations, and a person with a pen. We talk so grandly, in capital letters, of Morning in Mexico. All it amounts to is one little individual looking at a bit of sky and trees, then looking down at the page of his exercise book.
It is a pity we don't always remember this. When books come out with grand titles, like
The Future of America
or
The European Situation,
it's a pity we don't immediately visualize a thin or fat person, in a chair or in a bed, dictating to a bob-haired stenographer or making little marks on paper with a fountain pen.
—
Mornings in Mexico
(1927)
HENRI MICHAUX: "HE IS SUDDENLY AFRAID"
Preface: A man who knows neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal has put together this travel journal. But at the moment of signing he is suddenly afraid. So he casts the first stone. Here.
—The Author.—
Ecuador
(1928)
FREYA STARK: "I TRAVELED SINGLE-MINDEDLY FOR FUN"
I came to the conclusion that some more ascetic reason than mere enjoyment should be found if one wishes to travel in peace: to do things for fun smacks of levity, immorality almost, in our utilitarian world. And though personally I think the world is wrong, and I know that in my heart of hearts that it is a most excellent reason to do things merely because one likes the doing of them, I would advise all those who wish to see unwrinkled brows in passport offices to start out ready labeled as entomologists, anthropologists, or whatever other -ology they think suitable and propitious.
But as this book is intended for the Public, and is therefore necessarily truthful, I must admit that for my own party I traveled single-mindedly for fun.
—
The Valleys of the Assassins
(1934)
GERALD BRENAN: "THE GIRL WITH THE UNFORGETTABLE FACE"
All I have aimed at is to entertain a few armchair travelers, who may enjoy whiling away a rainy night in reading of how people live in remote mountain villages in the serene climate of the South Mediterranean. One flies over these villages in the air, one sees their strange names on the map, one may even, if one leaves the main road, bump past them in a car, but their life remains as mysterious as that of the girl with the unforgettable face one caught sight of for a moment through the window of a railway carriage. Here is a description of one of those villages.
—
South from Granada
(1957)
V. S. PRITCHETT: "STAMPING OUT HIS ANXIETIES WITH HIS HEAVY BOOTS"
How did writers and painters manage to live and keep their independence?...The thing to do was to write an original book of travel ... I decided to take ship for Lisbon for economy's sake and walk from Badajoz to Vigo, through a part of Spain that was little known and, in patches, was notorious for poverty...
I have described it all in
Marching Spain
—note the deliberately ungrammatical, protesting, affected title. Though I have a tenderness for the book and think some pages are rather good, I am glad it has been out of print for forty years ... It has a touching but shocking first chapter of exhibitionist prose; but despite the baroque writing of the rest, the mistakes of fact, and the declamations, it is original and has vigor. It is the work of a young man worried almost to illness by lack of money and by the future for a lot of the time. As he tramped along he was doing his accounts and stamping out his anxieties with his heavy boots.