Paul Theroux Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Paul Theroux
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.

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

Paul Theroux
Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.

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
It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory.

Paul Theroux
Writers are painful friends, and they are seldom friendly with others. They are insecure in the presence of other writers. Composers of certain kinds of music are the same--tormented and intolerant. Yet some arts not only make the artist social but make him depend upon sociability in order to succeed. Painting is one.

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

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
Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters; success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure.

Paul Theroux
Painters strike me as having warm uncomplicated friendships and probably more natural generosity than the practitioners of any other art. Perhaps this is because painting is such a portable, flexible thing.

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

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

Paul Theroux
The long morning shadows lay as still and dark as lakes and patterned the rough ground with straight margins.

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

Paul Theroux
Is there any point in going across the world to eat something or buy something or watch people squatting among their ruins? Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with distance or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience.

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

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

Paul Theroux
A French traveler with a sore throat is a wonderful thing to behold, but it takes more than tonsillitis to prevent a Frenchman from boasting.

Paul Theroux
In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan.

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

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

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

Paul Theroux
The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate's career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.

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

Paul Theroux