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Jonathan Raban Biography

Jonathan Raban (born 14 June 1942, Hempton, Norfolk, England) is a British travel writer and novelist. He has received several awards, such as the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and a 1997 Washington State Governor's Writer's Award. Since 1990 he has lived with his daughter in Seattle.

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Jonathan Raban Quotes

My new city [Seattle] and its hinterland felt deceptively homely. Their similar latitude gave them the angular light and lingering evenings I was used to. Their damp marine weather, blowing in from the southwest, came in the right direction. When the mountains are hidden under a low sky, one might almost imagine oneself to be in Britain.

Light, Marine, Oneself, Similar, Sky, Southwest

All this piling up of one technology on top of another-railroad on steamboat, interstate highway on railroad, hydroelectric dam on watermill-had reduced the Mississippi from a wonder of nature to this sluggish canal on the wrong side of the tracks.

Dam, Highway, Rivers, Technology, Top, Track

Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style.

Book, Dash, People, Style

I ain't sleeping. I'm just taking a good look at the insides of my eyelids.

Funny Inspirational, Good, Insides, Looks, Sleep, Sleeping

One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fiber of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardily.

Acceptance, Brave, Family, Foolhardily, Oddest, Stable

The trouble with ghostwriting is that it raises the issue of whether the president is in a state of diminished responsibility for what he says. Does he actually grasp the implications of the words he speaks?

Diminished, Issues, President, Responsibility, State

Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen.

Essentials, Loneliness, Make Things Happen, Spells, Things

If we live inside a bad joke, it is up to us to learn, at best and worst, to tell it well.

Bad, Bad Jokes, Learn, Tell, Wells, Worst

Good travel books are novels at heart.

Book, Heart, Novel, Good, Novels, Books

Because Washington state now votes by mail, elections here tend to play out, at an agonizingly slow speed, over many days and, sometimes, weeks.

Days, Mail, Play, Washington State, Weeks

It's been so long since a talented writer last occupied the White House; no wonder, then, that American writers have been among the most prominent of all the demographic groups claiming a piece of Barack Obama for themselves.

Claiming, House, Long, Obama, White

By the end of the 1980s, Seattle had taken on the dangerous lustre of a promised city. The rumour had gone out that if you had failed in Detroit you might yet succeed in Seattle - and that if you'd succeeded in Seoul, you could succeed even better in Seattle. . . Seattle was the coming place. So I joined the line of hopefuls.

Cities, Dangerous, Gone, Place, Rumour, Taken

Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.

Art, Thinking, Soul, Jealousy, Worthwhile

The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of feeling guilt; a dream pursued, and found vain, wanting, and destructive.

Cities, Destructive, Dream, Feelings, Pursued, Wanting

Seattle was built out on pilings over the sea, and at high tide the whole city seemed to come afloat like a ship lifting free from a mud berth and swaying in its chains.

Cities, High, Lifting, Mud, Sea, Seattle

The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obama's 'Dreams From My Father' is Jimmy Carter's short campaign autobiography, 'Why Not the Best?,' published in 1975.

Bears, Book, Dream, Dreams, Father, Modern

I loved the audacity of that American principle which says. When life gets tainted or goes stale, junk it! Leave it behind! Go West!

American, Audacity, Junk, Leave, Principles, West

We need more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.

Assessment, Cities, Disposal, Ecological, Serious, Unique

It always seems to me odd to call a place a wilderness when every wilderness area in the US bristles with rules and regulations as to how you can behave, what you're allowed to do, and is patrolled by armed rangers enforcing the small print. They're parks, of course, not wildernesses at all.

Bristles, Parks, Rules, Rules And Regulations, Small, Wilderness

Seattle is a liberal city, its politics not so much blue in the American, not the British, sense as deep ultramarine, and its manners are studiously polite.

Blue, Cities, Liberal, Manners, Polite, Ultramarine

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