Top 248 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Theroux

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Paul Theroux.

Last updated on December 25, 2024.

Paul Edward Theroux is an American novelist and travel writer who has written numerous books, including the travelogue, The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). Some of his works of fiction have been adapted as feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast, which was adapted for the 1986 movie of the same name and the 2021 television series of the same name.

American - Novelist | Born: April 10, 1941

Source: Wikipedia

I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.

Paul Theroux

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

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.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

Paul 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 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

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

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.

Paul Theroux

Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, it needs an angle, it needs a 'sound bite.

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

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

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

Paul Theroux

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.

Paul Theroux

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

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

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

Paul Theroux

The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place.

Paul Theroux

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.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.

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

The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the whole point of work, of life, of love.'

Paul Theroux

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

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

One of the things the 'Tao of Travel' shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them.

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

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

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

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

Paul Theroux

I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't want people to ask me questions about it.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

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

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

I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.

Paul Theroux

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.

Paul Theroux

There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go.

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

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

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

Love doesn't last.

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

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

I wanted the Peace Corps to be something very vague and unorganized, and to a large extent it was. It did not run smoothly. The consequence was that we were left alone.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

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.

Paul Theroux

Travel magazines are just one cupcake after another. They're not about travel. The travel magazine is, in fact, about the opposite of travel. It's about having a nice time on a honeymoon, or whatever.

Paul Theroux

I think I understand passion. Love is something else.

Paul Theroux

I am happy being what I am.

Paul Theroux

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

Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux