Paul Theroux Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Theroux
A society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.

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

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

Paul Theroux
Even the most distant and exotic place has its parallel in ordinary life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Theroux
He was turning sixty-two, not an age of life-altering shocks but only of subtle diminishments.

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Theroux