Paul Theroux Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.

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

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

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

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

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

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

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

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.

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.

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.