Quotes from Robyn Davidson

My thoughts can sometimes be spurred by what I read, but my reading is extremely eclectic.

The romantic view would be that nomads are wonderful people, better than us; they care about the environment.

The French word for wanderlust or wandering is 'errance.' The etymology is the same as 'error.' So to wander is to make mistakes. In other words, to make mistakes, to make errors is sort of the idea of learning through trial and error, allowing the mistakes to be part of the process.

As you get older, you do just get tired.

I do believe that the genre reached its peak before the First World War.

There are worse things than being called 'the camel lady,' I suppose.

When I was young, I thought I wouldn't be a good mother. Now I think I would be, but I'm too long in the tooth.

I'm not one of those true writers who can't bear not to be writing. Yet it's one of the most important things in my life.

Thank God for being a writer, because you do sort of find out what you think by the process of writing.

I just don't see myself as a travel writer. I can't. I don't.

Much of the time I'm an introvert, by choice spending a lot of time on my own. I suppose liking my solitude is part of a writer's sensibility.

I believe when you're stuck in one spot for too long it's best to throw a grenade where you stand, and jump…and pray.

Real travel would be to see the world, for even an instant, with another's eyes

The most difficult part of any endeavour is taking the first step, making the first decision.

Some instinct - and I think it was a correct one - led me to do something difficult enough to give my life meaning.

I do not mean to say that we should, or could, return to traditional nomadic economies. I do mean to say that there are systems of knowledge and grand poetical schemata derived from the mobile life that it would be foolish to disregard or underrate. And mad to destroy.

The agricultural revolution transformed the earth and changed the fate of humanity. It produced an entirely new mode of subsistence, which remains the foundation of the global economy to this day.

The truth is I'm not really interested in travel writing as it's generally conceived, and even less so in female travel writing.

Some of the best conversations I've had are sitting around a camp fire.

You have to remember that I was an Australian girl of the Fifties and Sixties. For Australians at that time, it was imperative to get out of the country and discover the world.

You apply the skills you use to produce your own book to make an anthology. Shaping. Rhythm.

Of course, in India, I always said, 'Oh yes, I'm married.'

The genre has moved into this commercial aspect of itself, and ignored this extraordinarily rich literature that's filed everywhere else except under travel.

Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore.