Paul Theroux Quotes & Sayings

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

The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away. — Paul Theroux

Believe me, England's prisons are full of splendid people. — Paul Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

The murderous, self-elected, megalomaniacal head of state with the morals of a fruit fly is an obscene feature of African life that is not likely to disappear. — Paul Theroux

Telling the truth and being ethical often keeps people from political power, but doing the right thing, always, without exception, is all that matters in the long run, and is ultimately powerful. That's why the true heroes of the civil rights struggle were never politicians. They were humble folk on a mission, enduring sit-ins and organizing marches and debates. When they began to succeed, the politicians, seeing an opportunity, followed them. — Paul Theroux

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

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

Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it. — Paul Theroux

The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate's career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter. — Paul Theroux

I do not want to be young again. — Paul Theroux

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

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

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. — Paul Theroux

My greatest inspiration is memory. — Paul Theroux

Reading about a far-off place can be a satisfaction in itself, and you might be thankful you're reading about the bad trip without the dust in your nose and the sun burning your head, not having to endure the unrewarding nuisance and delay of the road. But reading can also be a powerful stimulus to travel. — Paul Theroux

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

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

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

I think I am typical in believing that the Peace Corps trained us brilliantly and then did little more except send us into the bush. It was not a bad way of running things. — Paul Theroux

Mimicry reassures the weak, and the envious fool takes the risk as often as the visionary who mocks the error and leave the man alone. — Paul Theroux

The people I've known who've done great things of that type - you know, building hospitals, running schools - are very humble people. They give their lives to the project. — Paul Theroux

I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction. — Paul Theroux

I think I understand passion. Love is something else. — Paul Theroux

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

I said I didn't think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes - better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry predatory poor. All the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to assure their continued prosperity. — Paul Theroux

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

Sightseeing, an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity, flattering oneself with the notion that one is discovering the past when really one is inventing it, using a guidebook as a scenario of swift notations. — Paul Theroux

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

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

I should start by saying that traveling in the States is a bit like traveling in Asia. You need it, it helps to have an introduction - that there is a certain network. — Paul Theroux

Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists. The tourists at Etosha conjure up a fantastic Africa after their nightly dinner by walking to the fence at the hotel-managed waterhole to stare at the rhinos and lions and eland coming to drink: a glimpse of wild nature with overhead floodlights. They have been bused to the hotel to see it, and it is very beautiful, but it is no effort....My only boast in travel is my effort... — Paul Theroux

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

All journeys were return journeys — Paul Theroux

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

Listen, stranger; this was myself: this was I. — Paul Theroux

Sometimes I miss Boston', I said. It was a timid confession. I missed it every day - its space, its familiar streets and smells. I missed the laughter, I missed the feel of American money which was like the feel of flesh. Reality for me was the past, and it was elsewhere. This - London - was like a role I had been assigned to play, and I was still yet unsure of my lines. — Paul Theroux

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening. — Paul Theroux

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

.. and I began to think that the strictures of Islam would quickly make me a fancier of the margins of anatomy, thrilling at especially trim ankles, seeking a wink behind a veil, or watching for a response in the shoulders of one of those shrouded forms. — Paul Theroux

The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It's a passion. And I can't understand people who don't want to travel. — Paul Theroux

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

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

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

Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books. — Paul Theroux

The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth. — Paul Theroux

Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control. — Paul Theroux

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

Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me. — Paul Theroux

I am a book-collector, a proud avocationist in what Eric Quayle (wrongly) asserts to be the "least vicious" of hobbies (we are quite savage). We collectors are puzzled and often piqued unpleasantly by the common, absurd notion whereby we are only a pack of myopic, semi-crazed old pedants fretting over a book's colophon, dull dogs full of humorless zeal and no conversation, who suck our fingers free of pounce. — Paul Theroux

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

The place that interests me most, actually, is the United States. I've realized that I haven't traveled much in the States. There's a lot to see. — Paul Theroux

If you look at a map, you see that Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. It's 17 hours of straight flying from London. It's very far away, and sometimes you feel as if you're on another planet. But I like that. Also, that's ideal for writing. — Paul Theroux

Drunk people, loud people, obvious and angry people, people stammering and stumbling, spilling drinks and scarfing small burned sausages and cheese cubes on toothpicks. They had surrendered all power and direction, they they were yelling and gasping. They strengthened me. I did not want to be that way. I stood calmer, observing them. — Paul Theroux

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

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

I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble. — Paul Theroux

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

Nyasaland was the perfect country for a volunteer. It was friendly and destitute; it was small and out-of-the-way. It had all of Africa's problems - poverty, ignorance, disease. — Paul Theroux

Before I left the house I put my head into the boys' bedroom. The room was cool but the children seemed to radiate warmth - their glow was in the air - and this warmth from such a small bed I associated with their good hearts. They still smelled soapily of their baths, and I kissed their warm cheeks and whispered good night. What is it in darkness that makes us whisper? — Paul Theroux

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

I have a hatred of the taming of animals, especially large ones that are so contented in the wild. I abominate circus acts that involve big befooled beasts
cowed tigers or helplessly roaring lions pawing the air and teetering on small stools. I deplore zoos and anything to do with animal confinement or restraint. — Paul Theroux

And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me want to go forward. — Paul Theroux

Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse. Travel gives you glimpses of the past and the future, your own and other people's. — Paul Theroux

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

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. — Paul Theroux

Ambassador Noyes had another trait I had noticed in many slow-witted people: he was tremendously interested in philosophy. — Paul Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us. — Paul Theroux

We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose. — Paul Theroux

All serious travelers arrive at this doubting, why-bother juncture, stalling on the road, sometime or other. — Paul Theroux

The Swahili word safari means journey, it has nothing to do with animals, someone 'on safari' is just away and unobtainable and out of touch. — Paul Theroux

The dubious achievement in travel these days is enduring the persistent nuisance of a succession of airports in order to arrive at a distant place for a brief interlude of the exotic, — Paul Theroux

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

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

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

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. — Paul Theroux

I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write. — Paul Theroux

Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tedium, and this is why I choose to travel alone. — Paul Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals. — Paul Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

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

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

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction. — Paul Theroux

Connection 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. — Paul Theroux

People say writing is really hard. That's very unfair to those who are doing real jobs. People who work in the fields or fix roofs, engineers, or car mechanics. I think lying on your back working under an oily car, that's a job. — Paul Theroux

A train journey is travel; everything else - planes especially - is transfer, your journey beginning when the plane lands. - GRB — Paul Theroux

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

The Trans-Siberian Express is like a cruise across an oceanic landscape. I've done it three times. — Paul Theroux

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. — Paul Theroux

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

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

A little farther on, he said, "What do you think of India?" "It's a hard question," I said. I wanted to tell him about the children I had seen that morning pathetically raiding the leftovers of my breakfast, and ask him if he thought there was any truth in Mark Twain's comment on Indians: "It is a curious people. With them, all life seems to be sacred except human life." But I added instead, "I haven't been here very long. — Paul Theroux

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

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

I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness. — Paul Theroux

All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting. — Paul Theroux

Nothing is more satisfying in travel than to land in a place and assume an occupation, even a temporary one, as a teacher. — Paul Theroux