Paul Theroux Quotes

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were ...

I said I didn't think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people ...

There's always a way if you're not in a hurry.

Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers -...

In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.

What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off fr...

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

One of the things the 'Tao of Travel' shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most t...

If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay at home and be brilliantly...

You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw u...

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends ...

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I...

When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a ph...

I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off eve...

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a tra...

Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doct...

I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and ...

The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business, but it's the only thin...

The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Ro...

Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience...

I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I'd like to identify who it is. Aft...

I had cooperated. I could not have refused. I was smitten with her, half in love but also afraid, be...

...it was just a version of Rimbaud in Harar: the exile, a selfish beast with modest fantasies of po...

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one ...

You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back

Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an...

As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event...

I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I kne...

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

The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young pers...

I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist, but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel a...

The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It's a passion. And I can't understand people w...

Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual ...

I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new ...

...luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you...

The idea of traveling in Africa for me is based on going by road or train or bus or whatever and cro...

At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found mysel...

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

A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about ha...

The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.

Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinti...

The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosi...

Nature is crooked. I wanted right angles and straight lines. Ice! Oh, why do they all drip? You cut ...

And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a ...

Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and p...

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would...

If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by de...

The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something - a lands...

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. Travel is glamorou...

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with su...

When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and ...

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye se...

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a go...

So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest...

...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.

Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topogr...

One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy— at the time, not afterwards...

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contract...

The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures -- I mean, where the living...

Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putt...

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

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on ...

..luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you ...

Last days? Don't they know? These are the traits of all days, every day, everywhere.