Paul Theroux quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Paul Theroux on Wise Famous Quotes.

The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business, but it's the only thing they've been allowed to do.

Listen, stranger; this was myself: this was I.

Normal, nice people don't become writers.

The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It's a passion. And I can't understand people who don't want to travel.

One thinks one is going to the tropics and one finds oneself in the Chinese version of Welwyn Garden City.

You leave the States, and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you.

His education was sketchy, yet he was immensely learned in the oblique and selective way of someone self-taught.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

It's not fashionable but I like to spit out of the window of a moving train.

Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.

I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don't want to relax. I want to see something.

A place that doesn't welcome tourists, that's really difficult and off the map, is a place I want to see.

He was serene, fulfilled, the real thing, the person no one wants to hear about, a happy man.

The place that interests me most, actually, is the United States. I've realized that I haven't traveled much in the States. There's a lot to see.

I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties.

Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.

Mimicry reassures the weak, and the envious fool takes the risk as often as the visionary who mocks the error and leave the man alone.

In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.

Reading liberates you. You could know about the world through reading.

You need to be on your own so that you can meet people as you are, and as they are.

It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.

Duffil had that uneasy look of a many who has left his parcels elsewhere,which is also the look of a man who thinks he's being followed.

Death rephrases the life of everyone who's near.

All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting.

Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.

The Swahili word safari means journey, it has nothing to do with animals, someone 'on safari' is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.

The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.

What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one's whole life.

There are few things more abrasive to the human spirit, even in Patagonia, than someone standing behind you chomping and sucking ice cubes.

Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.

Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence.

The saddest task for the ironist is having to tell the listener that it's a joke, because of course it is never a joke.

The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

People see a hungry face, and they want to feed it; that's a natural response.

My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.

All solitary travel offers a sort of special license allowing you to be anyone you want to be

There has to be a measure of difficulty or problem-solving in travel for it to be worthwhile.

Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't.

But, truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes.

People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.

Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.

An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.

These chicken feet are first quality. You appreciate them?

A person who is tired of London is not necessarily tired of life; it might be that he just can't find a parking place.

I am happy being what I am.

I decided that travel was flight and pursuit in equal parts,

Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.

Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.

It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.

Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.

Reading is also a journey. It's a process of discovery.

You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.

I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness.

Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.

All politicians, even the most idealistic ones, are looking for money, sucking up to rich people.

When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home.

I cannot make my days longer, so I strive to make them better.

The happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance is not the works of Shakespeare (as Buck Mulligan says) but the Holy Bible.

The Colombians are good-tempered people. They are used to waiting for buses that are late, used to riding buses and trains that do not arrive.

There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go.

A foreign swear-word is practically inoffensive except to the person who has learnt it early in life and knows its social limits.

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.

There's always a way if you're not in a hurry.

Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.

Fiction gives us the second chance that life denies us.

I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.

When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation
experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way

And that is all anyone can do, try to be honest about what he feels, what he's seen or thinks he's seen.

You may not know it but I'm no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in.

Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books.

One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.

If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.

Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.

I've never spent a whole year in one place without leaving.

Tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash
suspicious, unbelieving, and incurious.

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.

On that trip it was my good fortune to be wrong; being mistaken is the essence of the traveler's tale.

Time is a factor in travel, one of the most crucial.

Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.

Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.

book of Revelation,

I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble.

Solitary people make the best travellers

For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.

Airplanes have dulled and desensitized us; we are encumbered, like lovers in a suit of armor.

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think.

The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.

The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.

Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.

I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.

You must not judge people by their country. In South America, it is always wise to judge people by their altitude.