Paul Theroux Quotes

#1. Paul Theroux was sitting in the pew (at Bruce Chatwin's memorial service) behind him. "I suppose we'll be here for you next week, Salman," he said.

Salman Rushdie

#2. Through his long, productive career, Paul Theroux has mixed nonfiction books about exotic travel with novels set in exotic places. Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras - he lives in and writes about places most of us never see.

Floyd Skloot

#3. You travel all over," the woman said. "Do you write about your travels?" I said, Yes, I did. Articles. Books. Whatever. "You must write Paul Theroux-type travel books," she said. I said, Exactly, and told her why.

Paul Theroux

#4. 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

#5. The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures
I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road.

Paul Theroux

#6. Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.

Paul Theroux

#7. Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.

Paul Theroux

#8. I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.

Paul Theroux

#9. 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

#10. When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.

Paul Theroux

#11. Going slowly [ ... ] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

Paul Theroux

#12. You must not judge people by their country. In South America, it is always wise to judge people by their altitude.

Paul Theroux

#13. A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.

Paul Theroux

#14. Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, it needs an angle, it needs a 'sound bite.

Paul Theroux

#15. The three biggest funerals in Alabama history define the state's contending loyalties, I was told: George Wallace's, Martin Luther King's, and Bear Bryant's.

Paul Theroux

#16. The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that equals the Yangtze River, that equals the Nile. We have the greatest cities in the world - among the greatest cities in the world.

Paul Theroux

#17. The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.

Paul Theroux

#18. There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go.

Paul Theroux

#19. One thinks one is going to the tropics and one finds oneself in the Chinese version of Welwyn Garden City.

Paul Theroux

#20. You may not know it but I'm no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in.

Paul Theroux

#21. When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.

Paul Theroux

#22. Love doesn't last.

Paul Theroux

#23. I guessed it was a migratory bird, too innocent to be wary of the spiders in the jungle grass. It worried be to think that we were a little like that bird

Paul Theroux

#24. There are two places that are hard to write about. A place like Britain, England in particular, which has been written about by everybody, and then the place that's never been written about.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

#26. People see a hungry face, and they want to feed it; that's a natural response.

Paul Theroux

#27. I don't look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren't there, there would be no economy. So I understand why a tourist economy is necessary.

Paul Theroux

#28. 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

#29. There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.

Paul Theroux

#30. Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books.

Paul Theroux

#31. When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home.

Paul Theroux

#32. 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

#33. One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.

Paul Theroux

#34. 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

#35. That was my Malawian epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. All the others, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.

Paul Theroux

#36. One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.

Paul Theroux

#37. 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

#38. Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life

Paul Theroux

#39. Ambassador Noyes had another trait I had noticed in many slow-witted people: he was tremendously interested in philosophy.

Paul Theroux

#40. I decided that travel was flight and pursuit in equal parts,

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

#42. 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

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

Paul Theroux

#44. just a short trip to any French territory in the Pacific is enough to convince even the most casual observer that the French are among the most self-serving, manipulative, trivial-minded, obnoxious, cynical, and corrupting nations on the face of the earth.

Paul Theroux

#45. Travel magazines are just one cupcake after another. They're not about travel. The travel magazine is, in fact, about the opposite of travel. It's about having a nice time on a honeymoon, or whatever.

Paul Theroux

#46. All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

Paul Theroux

#47. Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

Paul Theroux

#48. You leave the States, and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you.

Paul Theroux

#49. You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.

Paul Theroux

#50. 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

#51. What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one's whole life.

Paul Theroux

#52. The past wasn't dead, nor past. She herself was black, and was explaining the demographic of the Black Belt today by referring to slavery, still a visitable memory because of the persistence of its effects.

Paul Theroux

#53. Africa is really a place for the wealthy traveler. It's got some nice hotels, but they're very expensive hotels. It doesn't really cater to the backpacker or to the overland traveler.

Paul Theroux

#54. These chicken feet are first quality. You appreciate them?

Paul Theroux

#55. My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.

Paul Theroux

#56. The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

Paul Theroux

#57. If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

#59. I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster.

Paul Theroux

#60. travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.

Paul Theroux

#61. The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

#63. My earliest thought, long before I was in high school, was just to go away, get out of my house, get out of my city. I went to Medford High School, but even in grade school and junior high, I fantasized about leaving.

Paul Theroux

#64. The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something - a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unusual is a very sustaining thing in travel.

Paul Theroux

#65. It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

Paul Theroux

#66. Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.

Paul Theroux

#67. I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I'd like to identify who it is.
After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I thought: And who am I? Please tell me who I am and what I'm doing.

Paul Theroux

#68. There are places that I've always wanted to go. First I went to Africa, and when I was there I realized there were places in Africa I really to wanted to visit: The Congo, West Africa, Mombassa. I wanted to see the deep, dark, outlandish places.

Paul Theroux

#69. To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration.

Paul Theroux

#70. A society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

#72. Less frightening, but no less disgusting, is the Iranian taste for jam made out of carrots.

Paul Theroux

#73. Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things.

Paul Theroux

#74. To travel unconnected, away from anyone's gaze or reach, is bliss

Paul Theroux

#75. All solitary travel offers a sort of special license allowing you to be anyone you want to be

Paul Theroux

#76. Nothing is more satisfying in travel than to land in a place and assume an occupation, even a temporary one, as a teacher.

Paul Theroux

#77. A British traveler remarked, 'There are [fashions in Guatemala] which it would require more than common charity to speak of with respect ... '
FILL IN YOUR OWN GRIPES! ;-)

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

#79. The place that interests me most, actually, is the United States. I've realized that I haven't traveled much in the States. There's a lot to see.

Paul Theroux

#80. All politicians, even the most idealistic ones, are looking for money, sucking up to rich people.

Paul Theroux

#81. I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

#83. Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

Paul Theroux

#84. 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

#85. I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble.

Paul Theroux

#86. For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.

Paul Theroux

#87. I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about.

Paul Theroux

#88. I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties.

Paul Theroux

#89. Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

Paul Theroux

#90. Painters paint outdoors, or in rooms full of people; they paint their lovers, alone, naked; they paint and eat; they paint and listen to the radio. It is a soothing way of doing your job.

Paul Theroux

#91. It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.

Paul Theroux

#92. 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

#93. When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost.

Paul Theroux

#94. The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space

Paul Theroux

#95. We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

#97. Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation
experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way

Paul Theroux

#98. My greatest inspiration is memory.

Paul Theroux

#99. The Swahili word safari means journey, it has nothing to do with animals, someone 'on safari' is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.

Paul Theroux

#100. Death rephrases the life of everyone who's near.

Paul Theroux