Paul Theroux famous quotes

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

#Self #Islands #World

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.
-- Paul Theroux

#Lonely #Teacher #Loneliness

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

#Inspiring #Strive #Productivity

Tibet has a very proud people but it's culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It's like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it's gone.
-- Paul Theroux

#Rhinos #People #Chinese

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

#Travel #Moving #Risk

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.
-- Paul Theroux

#Limits #Capacity #Great Things

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
-- Paul Theroux

#Second Chance #Giving #Fiction

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

#People #Rich #Politician

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

#Attitude #Mind #States

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

#Lying #Sun #Tourists

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.
-- Paul Theroux

#Taken #Fate #Men

One of the upsides of tourism is that people begin to take themselves a little more seriously (and think their) culture is worth something. So rather than disparaging the local culture, they vitalize it.
-- Paul Theroux

#Thinking #People #Culture

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
-- Paul Theroux

#Inspirational #Funny #Travel

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

#Years #Tourists #Would Be

Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.
-- Paul Theroux

#Grace #Mind #Hawaii

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.
-- Paul Theroux

#Animal #People #Tough Times

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

#Long #Going Away #Return

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

#Goes On #Tourists #Safari

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

#Travel #Worst #Magical Places

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.
-- Paul Theroux

#Two #People #World

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

#Photography #Eye #Lust

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.
-- Paul Theroux

#Country #Fall #Glasses

So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
-- Paul Theroux

#Men #Istanbul #Sight

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

#Eagles #Dying #Nests

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
-- Paul Theroux

#Compassion #Behavior #Civilized

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.
-- Paul Theroux

#Hero #Boredom #Novelists

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

#Romance #Sensuality

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

#Creative #Cooking #Kitchen

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.
-- Paul Theroux

#Falling In Love #Children #Thinking

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.
-- Paul Theroux

#Hassle #Overwhelming

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

#Problem #Problem Solving #Worthwhile

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

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.
-- Paul Theroux

#Educational #Animal #People

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
-- Paul Theroux

#Lonely

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

#Thinking #Simple #Rewarding Experiences

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

#Inspirational #Funny #Travel

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

#Guests #Want #Invisible

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

#Madness #Accomplished #Clear

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.
-- Paul Theroux

#Writing #Who I Am #People

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.
-- Paul Theroux

#Book #Reading #People

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

#Lonely #Loneliness #About Yourself

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.
-- Paul Theroux

#Death #Art #Love Life

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.
-- Paul Theroux

#Country #Oil #Would Be

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

#Live Your Life #Destination #Reaching

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

#Travel #Adventure #Journey

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.
-- Paul Theroux

#Funny #Travel #Grateful

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

#Gains #Reputation #Modest

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

#Writing #Capable

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

#Lonely #Ideas #Phones

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
-- Paul Theroux

#Travel #Retrospect #Glamorous

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

#Travel #Kindness #Hands