Paul Theroux Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

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

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

Paul Theroux
Mustn't grumble was the most English of expressions. English patience was mingled inertia and despair. What was the use? But Americans did nothing but grumble! Americans also boasted. "I do some pretty incredible things was not an English expression. "I'm fairly keen" was not American. Americans were showoffs — it was part of our innocence — we often fell on our faces; the English seldom showed off, so they seldom looked like fools.

Paul Theroux
All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

Paul Theroux
Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it.

Paul Theroux
What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry.

Paul Theroux
The trouble with cameras is that people see them a mile away.

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

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

Paul Theroux
Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.

Paul Theroux
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

Paul Theroux
Assigning human personalities to animals is the chief trait of the pet owner—the doting dog-lover with his baby talk, the smug stay-at-home with a fat lump of fur on her lap who says, "Me, I'm a cat person," and the granny who puts her nose against the tin cage and makes kissing noises at her parakeet. Their affection is often tinged with a sense of superiority. Deer and duck hunters never talk this way about their prey, though big game hunters— Hemingway is the classic example — often sentimentalize the creatures they blow to bits and then lovingly stuff to hang on the wall.

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
Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

Paul Theroux
Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer-a mediocre poet.

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

Paul Theroux
I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in my opinion. This version of masculinity is a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one's entire life (by contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppressive sense of nakedness).

Paul Theroux
A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler. Nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness.

Paul Theroux
It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.

Paul Theroux
The notion of a literary quarrel – or anything that looks like a quarrel – is like catnip to literary philistines and lazy intellects.

Paul Theroux
No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.

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

Paul Theroux