Paul Theroux Quotes - Page 3

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

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.

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

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.

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties.

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.

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

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

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.

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

Truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes.

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

There's a lot of sensuality that I associate with travel. And that's romance.

Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.

... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.

... 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.

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

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

travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think.

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.

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

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.