Paul Theroux Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.
Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't.
People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.
An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.
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.
Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.
Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.
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.
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
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.
A foreign swear-word is practically inoffensive except to the person who has learnt it early in life and knows its social limits.
In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.
Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.
Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation
experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way
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.
If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.
Tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash
suspicious, unbelieving, and incurious.
suspicious, unbelieving, and incurious.
On that trip it was my good fortune to be wrong; being mistaken is the essence of the traveler's tale.
Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.
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.