Paul Theroux Quotes about Travel

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

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.

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

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

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

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.

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

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

The traveler's boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience - shocking though it may seem at the time - is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.

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

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