Paul Theroux Quotes

There has to be a measure of difficulty or problem-solving in travel for it to be worthwhile.

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.

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

... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't.

They say that if the Swiss had designed these mountains they'd be rather flatter.

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

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

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

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

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.

Loneliness in travel directs you and tells you about yourself. You don't become lonely unless you're alone.

Reading is also a journey. It's a process of discovery.

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

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

I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.

Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.

No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.

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

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think.

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.

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

My greatest inspiration is memory.

The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing.

A French traveler with a sore throat is a wonderful thing to behold, but it takes more than tonsillitis to prevent a Frenchman from boasting.

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.

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

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

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.

It's not fashionable but I like to spit out of the window of a moving train.

travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.

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

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

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

The Colombians are good-tempered people. They are used to waiting for buses that are late, used to riding buses and trains that do not arrive.

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.

I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.

There are two worlds: the world of the tourist and the world of everyone else. Often they're side by side. But the tourist doesn't actually see how people live.

There's a lot of sensuality that I associate with travel. And that's romance.

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

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

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.

Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer-a mediocre poet.

I sought trains; I found passengers.

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

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