Paul Theroux Quotes

149 quotes in 1834 categories

• 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…
• Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
• 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…
• 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…
• Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the…
• They say that if the Swiss had designed these mountains they'd be rather flatter.
• The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
• In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.
• Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.
• 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,…
• My greatest inspiration is memory.
• Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
• Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.
• Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
• Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
• 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.
• My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because…
• 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 taken…
• One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
• What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry.

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