Paul Theroux Quotes - Page 7

The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life - the homebound writer's irritants. But also being kept waiting is the human conditon.

Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.

For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.

The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again.

Bogotá seemed a cruel towering place, like an eagles' nest now inhabited by vultures and their dying prey.

The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.

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

There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.

And that is all anyone can do, try to be honest about what he feels, what he's seen or thinks he's seen.

Is there any point in going across the world to eat something or buy something or watch people squatting among their ruins? Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with distance or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience.

It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory.

One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.

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

I think I understand passion. Love is something else.

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.

The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate's career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.

Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.

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

The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business, but it's the only thing they've been allowed to do.

I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.

The monotony of staying in one place is the best thing for writing a novel. Having regular habits, a kind of security, but especially no big surprises, no shocks.

Writers are painful friends, and they are seldom friendly with others. They are insecure in the presence of other writers. Composers of certain kinds of music are the same--tormented and intolerant. Yet some arts not only make the artist social but make him depend upon sociability in order to succeed. Painting is one.

A person who is tired of London is not necessarily tired of life; it might be that he just can’t find a parking place.

There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail, knowing that everything you need is on your back. It is a confidence in having left the inessentials behind and of entering a world of natural beauty that has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a dead weight. The person with the fewest possessions is the freest. Thoreau was right.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.