Paul Theroux Quotes - Page 4

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

My greatest inspiration is memory.

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.

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

I sought trains; I found passengers.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster.

The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the same qualities that made English people seem stubborn and secretive made them, face to face, reliable and true to their word. I thought: The English do small things well and big things badly.

I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.

When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home.

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.

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.

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

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

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

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.

When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen.

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

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.

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.

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

People who don't read books a lot are threatened by books.

...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.

In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.

The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing.