Paul Theroux Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.

A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler. Nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness.

I am happy being what I am.

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.

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

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

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

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.

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

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.

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

"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.

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.

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).