quotes by Paul Theroux

"Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going."
— Paul Theroux

"Travel is glamorous only in retrospect."
— Paul Theroux

"Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us."
— Paul Theroux

"But art should require no instrument but memory."
— Paul Theroux (Picture Palace)

"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)

"travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts."
— 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)

"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

"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)

"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

"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)

""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

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"All journeys were return journeys"
— Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar)

"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)

"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)

"...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists."
— Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar)

"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