Paul Theroux Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Paul Theroux quotes, sayings and quotations 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. — Paul Theroux

Listen, stranger; this was myself: this was I. — Paul Theroux

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

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

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

Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel. — Paul Theroux

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

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

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

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride. — Paul Theroux

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

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind. — Paul Theroux

I'm a tourist, a glorified tourist. I'm not doing it to have a good time or to lie in the sun. — Paul Theroux

Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing. — Paul Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

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

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

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. — Paul Theroux

Love doesn't last. — Paul Theroux

Death rephrases the life of everyone who's near. — Paul Theroux

People who don't read books a lot are threatened by books. — Paul Theroux

All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting. — Paul Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

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

They say that if the Swiss had designed these mountains they'd be rather flatter. — Paul Theroux

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

Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution. — Paul Theroux

To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. — Paul Theroux

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

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

I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read. — Paul Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life — Paul Theroux

The Trans-Siberian Express is like a cruise across an oceanic landscape. I've done it three times. — Paul Theroux

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

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves. — Paul Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

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

There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable. — Paul Theroux

An aimless joy is a pure joy," I said, quoting Yeats. — Paul Theroux

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

Solitary people make the best travellers — Paul Theroux

A train journey is travel; everything else - planes especially - is transfer, your journey beginning when the plane lands. - GRB — Paul Theroux

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

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

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

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. — Paul Theroux

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

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

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

Pain does not create a long-lasting memory, but the memory of luxury exerts itself for ever. — Paul Theroux

travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts. — Paul Theroux

I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom. — Paul Theroux

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

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

These chicken feet are first quality. You appreciate them? — Paul Theroux

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

book of Revelation, — Paul Theroux

I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple. — Paul Theroux

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us. — Paul Theroux

Fiction gives us the second chance that life denies us. — Paul Theroux

I do not want to be young again. — Paul Theroux

My father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn't know what he did. But my kids were privy to the ups and downs of a writer's life. — Paul Theroux

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

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

One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone. — Paul Theroux

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness. — Paul Theroux

Believe me, England's prisons are full of splendid people. — Paul Theroux

Last days? Don't they know? These are the traits of all days, every day, everywhere. — Paul Theroux

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us. — Paul Theroux

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

Eating together is an occasion that humans have made into a peacemaking ritual; — Paul Theroux

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

I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler. — Paul Theroux

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

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. — Paul Theroux

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

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. — Paul Theroux

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

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

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. — Paul Theroux

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

Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace. — Paul Theroux

Loneliness in travel directs you and tells you about yourself. You don't become lonely unless you're alone. — Paul Theroux

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

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

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

He regarded himself as an accomplished writer - a clear sign of madness in anyone. — Paul Theroux

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

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. — Paul Theroux

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

My greatest inspiration is memory. — Paul Theroux

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

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

I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone babbling. — Paul Theroux

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect. — Paul Theroux

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming. — Paul Theroux

You can't want to be a writer. You have to be one. — Paul Theroux

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

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