Paul Theroux Quotes

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

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

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
There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail, knowing that everything you need is on your back. It is a confidence in having left the inessentials behind and of entering a world of natural beauty that has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a dead weight. The person with the fewest possessions is the freest. Thoreau was right.

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

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

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
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
I said I didn't think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes - better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry predatory poor. All the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to assure their continued prosperity.

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
The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away.

Paul Theroux
The difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy — how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.

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

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

Paul Theroux
I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.

Paul Theroux
The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life - the homebound writer's irritants. But also being kept waiting is the human conditon.

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

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

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

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

Paul Theroux
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.

Paul Theroux
People do not become writers out of healthy literary impulse, but out of a deep loneliness, a deficiency, a kind of dysfunction... and on the positive side, they turn to books for solace. It's all sorts of things. It's conceit. It's signalling for attention. People who are normal don't become writers.

Paul Theroux
What interests me is the waking in the morning, the progress from the familiar to the slightly odd, to the rather strange, to the totally foreign, and finally to the outlandish. The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing.

Paul Theroux
Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.

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

Paul Theroux