Quotes About Exploration

I travel pretty regularly throughout the football season with Arsenal and England, but we don't really get to explore. In the summer months, I get about four or five weeks off, and then I'll jet away to either the south of France, Dubai, or Italy.

We went out for six weeks a year. We first started in Mexico and we did that for so many years that we finally said we've got to explore and start going globally. And then we started going all over the world.

But I went down to Venezuela and spend a few weeks going through jungles. It's fantastic looking.

I have this desire to just while away weeks, months and years. It took me two years to make this record but that was with me trying to condense my process and not disappear down the rabbit hole with all the cool things I've collected. I could take 10 years and not explore everything I want to with these instruments.

I'm thinking about a few weeks in Montreal to work with a producer I met there.

My idea of a beach holiday is going to New York for two weeks, just going and hanging out.

My first holiday to San Francisco in 1998-99 was supposed to be a two-week vacation but I ended up staying five weeks and nearly didn't come home.

I'm never anywhere for more than three weeks.

Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.

Before doing fieldwork in Middle Egypt, I analyzed satellite imagery to determine exactly where I wanted to go. Within three weeks, I found about 70 sites. If I had approached this as a traditional foot survey, it would have taken me three and a half years.

I'm thinking my next book should be set on a tropical island, which will obviously require days, even weeks of meticulous research, but I'm prepared to make that sacrifice. That's just the sort of dedicated writer I am.

I strongly encourage listening to the radio to hear something you haven't heard before. It's a very healthy thing to do. It's strange: unless you reload your iPods every couple of weeks, you're listening to and recycling the same music all of the time. I'm serious. Listen to your radio station.

I was eight when we came to Australia. It was five amazing weeks onboard this ship - it was the Northern Star.

I love voyaging - the longest has been 3,000 miles to Hawaii. I've also spent weeks all over the Caribbean.

Musical accidents are a gold mine. The thing about accidental discoveries is they won't be made unless you put yourself in a position to make that discovery. To do that means hundreds of hours, days and weeks where you do things and don't discover anything.

I lived in grass huts in a jungle in the Philippines for three weeks with tribal people.

Research can be a boon to a novelist - there are more things in heaven and Earth than can be dreamt of in a single writer's philosophy - or it can become a hindrance, a thick layer of algae that weighs down the storytelling.

On Earth, I weighed 150 pounds; my suit and backpack weighed another 150. 300 pounds. Up there, I weighed only 50. So I could prance around on my toes. It was quite easy to do.

I've always found a cure for the blues is wandering into something unknown, and resting there, before coming back to whatever weight you were carrying.

Antarctica has this mythic weight. It resides in the collective unconscious of so many people, and it makes this huge impact, just like outer space. It's like going to the moon.

There were times, especially when I was traveling for 'Eat, Pray, Love,' when, I swear to God, I would feel this weight of my female ancestors, all those Swedish farmwives from beyond the grave who were like, 'Go! Go to Naples! Eat more pizza! Go to India, ride an elephant! Do it! Swim in the Indian Ocean. Read those books. Learn a language.'

At first I threw my weight upon my heels, as one does naturally in a boot, and was a good deal bruised, but after a few hours I learned the natural walk of man, and could follow my guide in any portion of the island.

And, uh, I did that, and there was nothing more ridiculous to me than finding the weight of the earth because I didn't care how much the earth weighed.

I still dream about being on the space station with the feeling of being weightless. The weightlessness is the most amazing, relaxing and natural feeling.