Paul theroux quotes

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.

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

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

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.

The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the same qualities that made English people seem stubborn and secretive made them, face to face, reliable and true to their word. I thought: The English do small things well and big things badly.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry.

Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.

I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple.

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.

When you travel you realize how small you are. You need to be humble. You can't be a big, brash American. You think you have problems. You leave the States and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you. They have nothing to eat, they have no water, they have no shelter, they have a terrible government. So you realize we complain about the government, we complain about food, whatever it is, and go somewhere else and you think, "Now I realize," you say, "Why people want to come to America."

When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen.

Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don't want to relax. I want to see something.

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

I sought trains; I found passengers.

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.

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

Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- "and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you.

Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.

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

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.

Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.

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.

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

To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it's a paradox of this sort of parallel life. A safari is an expensive experience and it's adjacent to a place where people are having a very tough time.

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.

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.

I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.

In a way, Che Guevara's fate was far worse than Simon Bolivar's. Guevara's collapse was complete: his intentions were forgotten, but his style was taken up by boutique owners (one of the fanciest clothes stores in London is called Che Guevara). There is no faster way of destroying a man or mocking his ideas than making him fashionable. That Che succeeded in influencing dress-designers was part of his tragedy.

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

The biggest surprise was that a country like Angola, that has so much money, that produces so much oil, would be in such a mess and so difficult to travel in. Something is almost cursed in striking oil. It's like the lottery winner who ends up broke.

Basically, what you find out is the limits of your patience and your strength and your capacity to adapt. You find that out in travel and being alone and being tested. So that's a great thing.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

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

You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I've ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare.

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

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

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

A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about having a very bad time, having a miserable time, even better. You don't want to read a book about someone having a great time in the South of France, eating and drinking and falling in love. What you want to read is a book about a guy going through the jungle, going through the arctic snow, having a terrible time trying to cross the Sahara, and solving problems as they go.

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

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

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

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

I am happy being what I am.

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.

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

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

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

"Connected" is the triumphal cry these days. Connection has made people arrogant, impatient, hasty, and presumptuous... I don't doubt that instant communication has been good for business, even for the publishing business, but it has done nothing for literature, and might even have harmed it. In many ways connection has been disastrous. We have confused information (of which there is too much) with ideas (of which there are too few). I found out much more about the world and myself by being unconnected.

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

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.

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

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

Airplanes have dulled and desensitized us; we are encumbered, like lovers in a suit of armor.

People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.

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

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

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.

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

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

My greatest inspiration is memory.

You can't save the rhinos and you can't preserve a culture. I'm very pessimistic. Once it's gone, it's over.

Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

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

Reading liberates you. You could know about the world through reading.

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

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

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.

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.

A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler. Nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.

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

Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.

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

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

I never stay with people and I never look people up when I travel. I depend more on just chance meetings. The advantage is that people don't know who I am. I meet people casually and they're not doing me a big favor because I'm going to write something.

It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.

I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in my opinion. This version of masculinity is a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one's entire life (by contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppressive sense of nakedness).

... Oceanic malaise. I never saw anyone reading anything more demanding than a comic book. I never heard any youth express an interest in science or art. No one even talked politics. It was all idleness, and whenever I asked someone a question, no matter how simple, no matter how well the person spoke English, there was always a long pause before I got a reply, and I found these Pacific pauses maddening. And there was giggling but no humor - no wit. It was just foolery.

Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.

He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.

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

Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence.

When I'm writing, I like to travel alone. If you really want to find out about a place, you need to be as free as possible to be spontaneous. You also need to be lonely, because loneliness is a great teacher, too.

travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.

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.

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

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

Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall.