Paul Theroux > Quotes

“Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.”
― Paul Theroux

“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”
― Paul Theroux

“Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.”
― Paul Theroux

“You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown

“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.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown

“Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way”
― Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents

“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.”
― Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

“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..”
― Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

“Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express

“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.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express

“travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.”
― Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

“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. ”
― Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

“I cannot make my days longer, so I strive to make them better.”
― Paul Theroux

“Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.”
― Paul Theroux

“I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.”
― Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

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

“But: all journeys were return journeys. The farther one traveled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be animated by any scene, one was most oneself, a man in a bed surrounded by empty bottles. The man who says, "I've got a wife and kids" is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan. But he does not know - how could he? - that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing compared to the change in himself; and travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography. From there any further travel makes a beeline to confession, the embarrassed monologue in a deserted bazaar. The anonymous hotel room in a strange city...”
― Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

“...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.”
― Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

“But art should require no instrument but memory.”
― Paul Theroux, Picture Palace

“The trains [in a country] contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar with its gadgets and passengers represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical. ”
― Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

“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.”
― Paul Theroux

“Connection" is the triumphal cry these days. Connection has made people arrogant, impatient, hasty, and presumptuous. ...I don't doubt that instant communication has been good for business, even for the publishing business, but it has done nothing for literature, and might even have harmed it. In many ways connection has been disastrous. We have confused information (of which there is too much) with ideas (of which there are too few). I found out much more about the world and myself by being unconnected.”
― Paul Theroux

“Ambassador Noyes had another trait I had noticed in many slow-witted people: he was tremendously interested in philosophy.”
― Paul Theroux, The London Embassy

“The least dignified thing that can happen to a man is to be murdered. If he dies in his sleep he gets a respectful obituary and perhaps a smiling portrait; it is how we all want to be remembered. But murder is the great exposer: here is the victim in his torn underwear, face down on the floor, unpaid bills on his dresser, a meager shopping list, some loose change, and worst of all the fact that he is alone. Investigation reveals what he did that day - it all matters - his habits are examined, his behavior scrutinized, his trunks rifled, and a balance sheet is drawn up at the hospital giving the contents of his stomach. Dying, the last private act we perform, is made public: the murder victim has no secrets.”
― Paul Theroux

“The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown

“The disorder in Yashar's apartment was that comfortable littering and stacking that only another writer can recognize as order - the considered scatter of papers and books a writer builds around himself until it acquires the cozy solidity of a nest.”
― Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

“The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away. ”
― Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

“All journeys were return journeys”
― Paul Theroux

“So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.”
― Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

“Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.”
― Paul Theroux

“There are few things more abrasive to the human spirit, even in Patagonia, than someone standing behind you chomping and sucking ice cubes.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express

“In elk land tonen de treinen de essentiële kenmerken van de cultuur: Thaise treinen hebben de badkruik met de geglazuurde draak op de zijkant, de Ceylonese een wagen die gereserveerd is voor boeddhistische monniken, de Indiase een vegetarische keuken en zes klassen. De Iraanse hun bidmatjes, de Maleisische een noedelstalletje, de Vietnamese kogelvrij glas op de locomotief en in elk rijtuig van de Russische Spoorwegen staat een samovar. De spoorwegbazaar met haar reizigers en vindinkjes vertegenwoordigde de maatschappij zó volmaakt dat je je bij het instappen blootstelde aan het nationale karakter. Soms leek het op een rustige collegezaal, maar soms kreeg ik ook wel eens het gevoel dat ik gevangenzat en werd overvallen door dat monsterachtige 'typische'.”
― Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

“Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.”
― Paul Theroux

“He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.”
― Paul Theroux

“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.”
― Paul Theroux

“What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, butterflies settled in long fluffy tracts. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if you drove too fast your tires lost their grip, and some people lost their lives, skidding on butterflies.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown

“In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.”
― Paul Theroux

“Perjalanan itu bersifat pribadi. Kalaupun aku berjalan bersamamu, perjalananmu bukanlah perjalananku.”
― Paul Theroux

“In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pinstriped suits, the best people are bare-assed.”
― Paul Theroux

“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.”
― Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

“Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”
― Paul Theroux