What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry. — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
“Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us. -Paul Theroux, novelist (b. 1941)” — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death. — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
My father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn't know what he did. But my kids were privy to… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
“Truth is not a saga of alarming episodes; it is a detail, usually a small one, that gives a fiction life.” — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person.… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
“The murderous, self-elected, megalomaniacal head of state with the morals of a fruit fly is an obscene feature of African life that… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
“I had cooperated. I could not have refused. I was smitten with her, half in love but also afraid, because in my… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it's a paradox of this sort of… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent. — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
A journey awakens all our old fears of danger and risk. Your life is on the line. You are living by your… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one's whole life. — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
A person who is tired of London is not necessarily tired of life; it might be that he just can’t find a… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence. — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
A foreign swear-word is practically inoffensive except to the person who has learnt it early in life and knows its social limits. — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life,… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
I was kind of raised with the suggestion that I had a duty to do; that life was real, life was earnest.… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
“That seemed to be a feature of life in the country [Malawi]: to welcome strangers, to let them live out their fantasy… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
I feel as if my mission is to write, to see, to observe, and I feel lazy if I'm not reaching conclusions. I feel… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals. — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend. — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
“sightseeing, an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity, flattering oneself with the… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't. — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
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… — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
Pain does not create a long-lasting memory, but the memory of luxury exerts itself for ever. — Paul Theroux Copy Share Image
![“That seemed to be a feature of life in the country [Malawi]: to welcome strangers, to let them live out their fantasy of philanthropy - a school, an orphanage, a clinic, a welfare center, a malaria eradication program, or a church; and then determine if in any of this effort and expense there was…” quote by Paul Theroux](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/465/paul-theroux-913_first-place_that-seemed-to-be-a-feature-of-life-in-t_2396396.jpg)
