Quotes from Jan Morris

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.

I half cherish the hope that the end of history will be Swissness.

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.

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

In a Kenya game park once I saw a family of wart-hogs waddling ungainly and in a tremendous hurry across the grass. Contemptuous though I am of those who find animals comic…still I could not help laughing at this quaint spectacle. My African companion rightly rebuked me. "You should not laugh at them," he said. "They are beautiful to each other.

Few conversations, at any time of life, are more stimulating, more spontaneous and more genuinely original than those long ridiculous talks we all have, when we are very young, late at night about the meaning of life.

The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.

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....

I never did think that my own conundrum was a matter either of science or of social convention. I thought it was a matter of the spirit, a kind of divine allegory, and that explanations of it were not very important anyway. What was important was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels.

Movement was the essence of Manhattan. It had always been so, and now its sense of flow, energy, openness, elasticity as Charles Dickens had called it, was headier than ever. Half the city's skill and aspirations seemed to go into the propagation of motion.

Certainly Delhi is unimaginably antique, and age is a metaphysic, I suppose. Illustrations of mortality are inescapable there, and do give the place a sort of nagging symbolism. Tombs of emperors stand beside traffic junctions, forgotten fortresses command suburbs, the titles of lost dynasties are woven into the vernacular, if only as street names.

Shaggy existentialists in frayed sandals, dilettantes by the score, spies by the portfolio.

Dublin was an English city, one of the loveliest. The most Irish thing about it was the shifting drab flow of the poor people

sometimes there have been moments when I have perfectly understood the self-portrait called Man Screaming which Egon Schiele painted after his return from Trieste to Vienna, and it has dawned upon me what a nightmare hiatus we all pass through, on the way from birth to death. Surely the only logical response would be to stand on a bridge and scream? But no, self-deception sees us through.

I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl (AS: I don't share that part of her feelings fully). I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.

Now nearly all the mysteries have gone, and there is scarcely an unknown country left to peer at.)

Orthodox Greeks, after a few generations of Venetian Catholic rule, frequently welcomed the arrival of the Muslim Turks – who, if they had unappealing weaknesses for mass slaughter, arson and disembowelment, at least did not despise their subjects as bumpkin schismatics.

One of the prizes of old age is its release from competition.

Could it be that racism is a sort of historical invention, a Satanic hoax?

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.

Its smallness is not petty; on the contrary, it is profound.

[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.

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