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)

"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

"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

"travel [is:] flight and pursuit in equal parts."
— Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar)

"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)

"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