Paul Theroux Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.

Paul Theroux
I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike — intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.

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

Paul Theroux
The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again.

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
You have to find out for yourself. Take the leap. Go as far as you can. Try staying out of touch. Become a stranger in a strange land. Acquire humility. Learn the language. Listen to what people are saying.

Paul Theroux
His mysterious travelling companion after looking out at the Alps:
They say if the Swiss had designed these mountains, um, they'd be rather flatter.

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

Paul Theroux
Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

Paul Theroux
In many ways connection has been disastrous. We have confused information (of which there has been too much of) with ideas (of which there are too few. I found out much more about the world and myself by being unconnected.

Paul Theroux
Television needs excitement, it needs an angle, it needs a sound bite.

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

Paul Theroux
The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space.

Paul Theroux