Top 248 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Theroux - Page 3

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

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.

One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.

I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about.

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.

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.

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

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).

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."

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

"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.

... 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.

travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.

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

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

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