Top 100 Theroux Quotes
#1. As I was writing, I realised I wasn't sufficiently extrovert to gather enough interesting souls with tall tales around me. I was no Louis Theroux. But neither was I interested in exploring my inner life in public, in the manner of a Jonathan Raban.
Clive Sinclair
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Jim Crace, Arthur C. Clarke, Russell Hoban, Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Tim O'Brien, Will Self and Marcel Theroux,
Bill Bryson
#5. My keep-match meals: I'm good to go together with kale salad. Actually, Justin [Theroux] makes an ideal one with a poached egg and quinoa. It's actually scrumptious.
Jennifer Aniston
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.
Paul Theroux
#10. Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.
Paul Theroux
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?
Alexander Theroux
#16. 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
#17. You must not judge people by their country. In South America, it is always wise to judge people by their altitude.
Paul Theroux
#18. A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
Paul Theroux
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The best reason for disbelieving in God is that he never gave us enough time in life to pursue enough knowledge to find sufficient truth.
Alexander Theroux
#22. Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.
Alexander Theroux
#23. 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
#24. In the '90s, there was a big bell-bottom craze. Everyone was wearing grungy bell-bottoms. It was so repugnant to me.
Justin Theroux
#25. The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.
Paul Theroux
#26. There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go.
Paul Theroux
#27. One thinks one is going to the tropics and one finds oneself in the Chinese version of Welwyn Garden City.
Paul Theroux
#28. 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
#29. When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.
Paul Theroux
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.
Alexander Theroux
#34. What arrogance made us think we were far enough to be safe?
Marcel Theroux
#35. The complexity of language, he thought to himself, lies not in its subject matter but in our knotted understanding.
Alexander Theroux
#36. The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.
Paul Theroux
#37. It's an industry of lonely people in a crowd, Bill Margold was saying. 'They're scared to get close to each other. You're far better off having someone to sleep next to then having someone to sleep with because you have to trust someone you sleep next to.
Louis Theroux
#38. People see a hungry face, and they want to feed it; that's a natural response.
Paul Theroux
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books.
Paul Theroux
#43. I haven't had a chance to pick up a good book in a long time, because I've been either reading scripts or learning them or writing them. And so, by the time the day is done, I usually just want to click on The Bachelor and fall asleep. But I gravitate toward biographies and things like that.
Justin Theroux
#44. In New York, you can bump into someone on the street and go to a thing, go get coffee real quick.
Justin Theroux
#45. When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home.
Paul Theroux
#46. 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
#47. Alcohol, for those addicted to it, is a kind of infatuation. It ends up displacing other relationships, becoming inseparable from your sense of who you are until a better, longer life no longer seems possible.
Louis Theroux
#48. One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
Paul Theroux
#49. 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
#50. Nothing is more subtly destructive than a closed circle of artists feeding on one another. Envy grows from insignificant differences between people, not from overwhelming inequalities ... it was envy that forced them to emulate each other, not esteem.
Alexander Theroux
#51. 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
#52. One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.
Paul Theroux
#53. 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
#54. I don't miss much about my childhood. I lived in a good neighborhood, a wacky neighborhood. It was a very boy-heavy neighborhood - kind of Lord of the Flies-y. So many weird things happened, funny things.
Justin Theroux
#55. 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
#56. Ambassador Noyes had another trait I had noticed in many slow-witted people: he was tremendously interested in philosophy.
Paul Theroux
#57. I decided that travel was flight and pursuit in equal parts,
Paul Theroux
#58. Tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash
suspicious, unbelieving, and incurious.
Paul Theroux
#59. 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
#60. Pain does not create a long-lasting memory, but the memory of luxury exerts itself for ever.
Paul Theroux
#61. I've never been shocked by anything on television, except the news.
Justin Theroux
#62. 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
#63. Though there is something cruel about being in Hawaii and you have a computer in front of you the whole time.
Justin Theroux
#64. 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
#65. When people call up Rush Limbaugh and say, 'It's an honor to speak to you,' I want to shoot myself.
Alexander Theroux
#67. 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
#68. The urge for Chinese food is always unpredictable: famous for no occasion, standard fare for no holiday, and the constant as to demand is either whim, the needy plebiscite of instantly famished drunks, or pregnancy.
Alexander Theroux
#70. You leave the States, and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you.
Paul Theroux
#71. You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.
Paul Theroux
#72. I always try to do the most interesting, fun thing for me.
Justin Theroux
#73. 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
#74. What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one's whole life.
Paul Theroux
#75. Now, with no hate group to run, Jerry spent his days playing Mah-jong on his computer
Louis Theroux
#76. Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the caliber of a bullet, teething beads.
Alexander Theroux
#77. How odd, I thought, that even though I don't believe it still feels nice to be included.
Louis Theroux
#78. I've always liked boots. I always think it's better to wear a boot, not a shoe.
Justin Theroux
#79. 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
#80. Being a fan of comedy, it's so unique, in their own voice. I was really stoked to be able to participate. They're so great at just coming up with stuff on the fly and making stuff funny.
Justin Theroux
#81. 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
#82. I think we need to tell stories that reflect our world.
Justin Theroux
#83. These chicken feet are first quality. You appreciate them?
Paul Theroux
#84. 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
#85. The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
Paul Theroux
#86. If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.
Paul Theroux
#87. In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.
Paul Theroux
#88. 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
#89. travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.
Paul Theroux
#90. The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.
Paul Theroux
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
Paul Theroux
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.
Alexander Theroux
#98. 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
#99. To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration.
Paul Theroux
#100. A society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
Paul Theroux
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