Explore Quotes by Paul Theroux

Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.

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, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again.

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.

Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.

In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.

The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.

They say that if the Swiss had designed these mountains they'd be rather flatter.

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.

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 big surprises, no shocks.

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 at the time - is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.

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 who is over certain of his plot.

... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.

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.

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.