Theroux Quotes & Sayings

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

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

An enlightened person raises the level of the consciousness of the entire community. — Phyllis Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

No one was interested in Malabo - this was why the people in the village must have suspected him of having a deeper motive for visiting. He wanted something from them - why else would he come all this way to live in a hut? Altruism was unknown. Forty years of aid and charities and NGOs had taught them that. Only self-interested outsiders trifled with Africa, so Africa punished them for it. — Paul Theroux

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

His education was sketchy, yet he was immensely learned in the oblique and selective way of someone self-taught. — 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

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

The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality. — Alexander Theroux

I thought ... their elegance ... lies not so much in their
clothes as in their bodies, and their bodies have received it, and continue to unceasingly receive it, from their souls, which are just like yours, lovely Simonetta. — Alexander Theroux

We were all so young that there were no lines on our faces to read between. — Phyllis Theroux

The trains [in a country] contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar with its gadgets and passengers represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical. — Paul Theroux

Tipping confounds me because it is not a reward but a travel tax, one of the many, one of the more insulting. No one is spared. It does not matter that you are paying thousands to stay in the presidential suite in the best hotel: the uniformed man seeing you to the elevator, inquiring about your trip, giving you a weather report, and carrying your bags to the suite expects money for this unasked-for attention. Out front, the doorman, gasconading in gold braid, wants a tip for snatching open a cab door, the bartender wants a proportion of your bill, so does the waiter, and chambermaids sometimes leave unambiguous messages, with an accompanying envelope, demanding cash. It is bad enough that people expect something extra for just doing their jobs; it is an even more dismal thought that every smile has a price. — Paul Theroux

I kneel to my Lord because I am such a failure. I pray, I hope, I look to the Gospels. — Alexander Theroux

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

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. — Paul Theroux

Bunt was disgustedly drinking a pint of beer, eyeing the table with resentment, the dishes of sticky pork and soggy and wilted lettuce, the black vegetables, the gray broth, the purple meat. On one dish of yellow meat was a severed chicken's head, its eyes blinded, its scalloped comb torn like a red rag. — 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

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

There is something talismanic about familiar words. — Marcel Theroux

To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy. — Alexander Theroux

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

There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail, knowing that everything you need is on your back. It is a confidence in having left the inessentials behind and of entering a world of natural beauty that has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a dead weight. The person with the fewest possessions is the freest. Thoreau was right. — Paul Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

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

Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time. — Alexander Theroux

I've always liked boots. I always think it's better to wear a boot, not a shoe. — Justin Theroux

I always go to bed thinking I'm the luckiest guy in the world. — Justin Theroux

Silence is the unbearable repartee. — Alexander Theroux

Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc. — Alexander Theroux

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

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

Little had changed after independence. Jomo Kenyatta's face hung in a framed portrait in every shop where Queen Elizabeth's had been. Some schools were built, some streets renamed. But educated people are a liability in a dictatorship: all the schools were underfunded, few of them succeeded. A great deal of foreign money was given to the government and most of it ended up in the pockets of politicians, some of whom were assassinated. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the fatness of corrupt African politicians. — Paul Theroux

I can feel my heart growing daily, which has its uncomfortable aspects, as if it could fall with the weight of love and break. — Phyllis 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

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

I hate when people make a really good product and then stop making it. I get annoyed. — Justin 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

The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something - a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unusual is a very sustaining thing in travel. — Paul Theroux

which proved yet again, as I had seen in many lands, that the Bible was often the happy hunting ground of an unbalanced mind. — Paul Theroux

I suppose there won't be any Mexican food in the whites-only homeland,' I said.
Hm, I'd never thought of that possibility' Jerry said. He paused. 'They wouldn't be allowed to vote but they could cook and clean for us. Afterall, we're not extremists. — Louis Theroux

That seemed to be a feature of life in the country [Malawi]: to welcome strangers, to let them live out their fantasy of philanthropy - a school, an orphanage, a clinic, a welfare center, a malaria eradication program, or a church; and then determine if in any of this effort and expense there was a side benefit - a kickback, a bribe, an easy job, a free vehicle. If the scheme didn't work - and few of them did work - whose fault was that? Whose idea was it in the first place? — Paul Theroux

There is probably no such thing as an innocent question, at least not when a parent is doing the asking. — Phyllis Grissim-Theroux

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

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

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

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

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. — Paul Theroux

Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things. — Paul Theroux

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

A party is a slightly artificial event where one learns the rudiments of human behavior at its most admirable: speaking when spoken to, looking somebody in the eye, shaking hands and being friendly under duress. — Phyllis Grissim-Theroux

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

You need to be on your own so that you can meet people as you are, and as they are. — Paul Theroux

- and the mocking realization that money was just colorful crumpled paper, hardly different from a candy wrapper, the market itself little more than a casino. — Paul Theroux

It's the fun part 'cause you don't have any of the real heavy-lifting to do. You just come in and shout and chew scenery, and just be awful and say a few jokes, and you don't have to carry the romantic storyline or the quest part of the story. You just pop up, every now and again. — Justin 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

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

Is there any point in going across the world to eat something or buy something or watch people squatting among their ruins? Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with distance or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience. — Paul Theroux

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

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. — Paul Theroux

I was always acting. I was doing after-school plays and stuff like that. — Justin Theroux

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

I had always believed that right was like north to my father: a thing as real as sunlight, a place on the map, the arrow on a compass. — Marcel Theroux

Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away? — Alexander Theroux

He was serene, fulfilled, the real thing, the person no one wants to hear about, a happy man. — Paul Theroux

My record was so bad that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troublemaker and was accepted as a volunteer only after a great deal of explaining and arguing. — Paul Theroux

There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate. It's not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another. — Alexander Theroux

The religious belief varies from village to village. Nearly all worship the cholera and smallpox deities, and there are traces of serpent worship. — Paul Theroux

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

During this week, Ragan has experience a bit of insecurity with me, the result of my being quieter than usual, which he interprets as being a withdrawal from him. "No," I countered, "it is a withdrawal into myself." I do not think the same need exists in him. Quiet can be the two of us reading silently. But he prefers that I be nearby. I need regular time without anybody else around in order to feel restored. — Phyllis Theroux

The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely. — 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

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

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it. — Alexander Theroux

There's a logic to dreams that doesn't necessarily follow linear narrative. You don't know why things happen, it's your subconscious pushing you, to give you information. — Justin Theroux

Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine. — Paul Theroux

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage. — Alexander Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

You can get stuff done in New York that you can't in Los Angeles. If you wanted to get some milk and get your shoes repaired and drop something off at the dry cleaner, that's an all-day adventure in Los Angeles. In New York, you can bang that out in half an hour. — Justin Theroux

No one tells you this, how having children multiplies your capacity for suffering. — Marcel Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

There are two places that are hard to write about. A place like Britain, England in particular, which has been written about by everybody, and then the place that's never been written about. — Paul Theroux

Do you know Aggrey Awori?' Mushana said, 'He's an old man.' Awori was my age, regarded as a miracle of longevity in an AIDS stricken country; a Harvard graduate, Class of '63, a track star. Thirty years ago, a rising bureaucrat, friend and confidant of the pugnacious prime minister, Milton Obote, a pompous gap-toothed northerner who had placed his trust in a goofy general named Idi Amin. Awori, powerful then, had been something of a scourge and a nationalist, but he was from a tribe that straddled the Kenyan border, where even the politics overlapped: Awori's brother was a minister in the Kenyan government. 'Awori is running for president.' 'Does he have a chance?' Mushana shrugged. 'Museveni will get another term. — Paul Theroux

Fame is something I think happens as a result of trying to do good work. If you're trying to be famous, your work usually suffers. — Justin Theroux

Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life. — Marcel 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

Dentists seem to me very orderly, businesslike people who appear to become somewhat bored with the routine of their work after a period of time. Perhaps I'm wrong. — Paul Theroux

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

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

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. — Paul Theroux

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

Normally when you're promoting something a lot, sometimes you get tired. — Justin Theroux

Suffering has no value, but you have to suffer in order to know that. I never found it easy to travel, yet the difficulty in it made it satisfying because it seemed in that way to resemble the act of writing - groping around in the dark, wandering into the unknown, coming to understand the condition of strangeness. — Paul Theroux

A journey awakens all our old fears of danger and risk. Your life is on the line. You are living by your own resources; you have to find your own way and solve every problem on the road. — Paul Theroux

I didn't have a lot of ambition, which I think was a good thing. I mean, I was ambitious about quality, but I wasn't ambitious in the "I've got to get a pilot!" way. I never went out to L.A. for pilot season. — Justin Theroux

Duffil had that uneasy look of a many who has left his parcels elsewhere,which is also the look of a man who thinks he's being followed. — Paul Theroux