Paul Theroux Quotes

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.

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

Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters; success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure.

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

Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.

I think I understand passion. Love is something else.

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

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

The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it.

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

The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace.

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

A foreign swear-word is practically inoffensive except to the person who has learnt it early in life and knows its social limits.

Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.

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

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

People who don't read books a lot are threatened by books.

Truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes.

You can't want to be a writer. You have to be one.

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.

I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.

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.

Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.

My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.

I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.

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

The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the whole point of work, of life, of love.

Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.

Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.

People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.

A person who is tired of London is not necessarily tired of life; it might be that he just can’t find a parking place.

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

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

Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.

It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory.

And that is all anyone can do, try to be honest about what he feels, what he's seen or thinks he's seen.

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.

Bogotá seemed a cruel towering place, like an eagles' nest now inhabited by vultures and their dying prey.

If people are driving you around to look at animals, that's wonderful. That's educational, but it's not necessarily enlightening and you're not finding out much about yourself.

Sometimes people read a book in order to not go on a trip. You read a book instead of going on the trip. And so the travel writer is doing the traveling for you.

I'm a tourist, a glorified tourist. I'm not doing it to have a good time or to lie in the sun.

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.

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.

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

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

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

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

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

At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.

The idea of traveling in Africa for me is based on going by road or train or bus or whatever and crossing borders. You can't travel easily or at all through some countries.