I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul. Baudelaire, ‘Any Where Out of this World!

As the young have discovered, the secret divinity of the twentieth century is Science. But Science is incapable of forming character. The more people talk of human sciences, the less effect human sciences have on man.

Anything was better than to be loved for one’s things.

Because they knew each other’s thoughts, they even quarrelled without speaking.

As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less ‘aggressive’ than sedentary ones.

As you go along, you literally collect places. I’m fed up with going to places; I shan’t go to anymore.

Evolution intended us to be travelers... Settlement for any length of time, in cave or castle, has at best been... a drop in the ocean of evolutionary time.

I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China and continue my profession. ‘As sanitary engineer?’ No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries in the world.

I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed’s dictum, ‘A journey is a fragment of Hell.’

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the ‘walks’ of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.