110+ Paul Theroux Quotes On Education, World And Travel

Paul Theroux is an American novelist and travel writer. He is best known for his travel books, such as The Great Railway Bazaar and The Mosquito Coast, as well as his novels, such as The Mosquito Coast and The Mosquito Coast. He is also the author of numerous non-fiction works, including Dark Star Safari and The Tao of Travel. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Paul Theroux on life, love, leadership.

Top 10 Paul Theroux Quotes

1. Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.
2. There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.
3. The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
4. I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.
5. 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.
6. Tibet has a very proud people but it's culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It's like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it's gone.
7. Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.
8. Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life
9. Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
10. Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

Paul Theroux Short Quotes

• It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
• When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.
• Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.
• The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
• The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
• They say that if the Swiss had designed these mountains they'd be rather flatter.
• Airplanes have dulled and desensitized us; we are encumbered, like lovers in a suit of armor.
• The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
• Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
• Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.

Paul Theroux Quotes About Life

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

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art. — Paul Theroux

I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees. — Paul Theroux

Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death. — Paul Theroux

Travel is about failure or overcoming obstacles, overcoming failures. When a traveler is having lots of good luck, that is not a happy book. That's a book you say, well, I don't need that. I want a life lesson. I want to find out - I want a journey that reflects my life. — Paul Theroux

I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in my opinion. This version of masculinity is a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one's entire life (by contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppressive sense of nakedness). — Paul Theroux

Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution. — Paul Theroux

The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the whole point of work, of life, of love. — Paul Theroux

A foreign swear-word is practically inoffensive except to the person who has learnt it early in life and knows its social limits. — Paul Theroux

What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry. — Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux Quotes About Love

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 islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones. — Paul Theroux

Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control. — Paul Theroux

Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things. — Paul Theroux

I think I understand passion. Love is something else. — Paul Theroux

I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties. — Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux Quotes About World

Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I've ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare. — Paul Theroux

Is there any point in going across the world to eat something or buy something or watch people squatting among their ruins? Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with distance or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience. — Paul Theroux

Reading liberates you. You could know about the world through reading. — Paul Theroux

Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. — Paul Theroux

There are two worlds: the world of the tourist and the world of everyone else. Often they're side by side. But the tourist doesn't actually see how people live. — Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux Quotes About Travel

Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience. — Paul Theroux

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming. — Paul Theroux

The biggest surprise was that a country like Angola, that has so much money, that produces so much oil, would be in such a mess and so difficult to travel in. Something is almost cursed in striking oil. It's like the lottery winner who ends up broke. — Paul Theroux

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect. — Paul Theroux

Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion. — Paul Theroux

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind. — Paul Theroux

I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple. — Paul Theroux

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

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

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

Paul Theroux Quotes About Order

Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters; success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure. — Paul Theroux

Sometimes people read a book in order to not go on a trip. You read a book instead of going on the trip. And so the travel writer is doing the traveling for you. — Paul Theroux

I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write. — Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux Quotes About Books

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

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. — Paul Theroux

When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books. — Paul Theroux

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places. — Paul Theroux

In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark. — Paul Theroux

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies. — Paul Theroux

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing. — Paul Theroux

I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read. — Paul Theroux

Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something. — Paul Theroux

People who don't read books a lot are threatened by books. — Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux Quotes About Late

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

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're grateful. — Paul Theroux

Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions. — Paul Theroux

The Colombians are good-tempered people. They are used to waiting for buses that are late, used to riding buses and trains that do not arrive. — Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux Famous Quotes And Sayings

The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business, but it's the only thing they've been allowed to do. — Paul Theroux

The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that equals the Yangtze River, that equals the Nile. We have the greatest cities in the world - among the greatest cities in the world. We have a large population. We have challenges. We have an indigenous population. — Paul Theroux

Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it. — Paul Theroux

You may not know it but I'm no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in. — Paul Theroux

I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don't want to relax. I want to see something. — Paul Theroux

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way — Paul Theroux

An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed. — Paul Theroux

Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence. — Paul Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources. — Paul Theroux

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

The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate's career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter. — Paul Theroux

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. — Paul Theroux

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

In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan. — Paul Theroux

Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation. — Paul Theroux

Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't. — Paul Theroux

I never stay with people and I never look people up when I travel. I depend more on just chance meetings. The advantage is that people don't know who I am. I meet people casually and they're not doing me a big favor because I'm going to write something. — Paul Theroux

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

No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere. — Paul Theroux

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

Painters strike me as having warm uncomplicated friendships and probably more natural generosity than the practitioners of any other art. Perhaps this is because painting is such a portable, flexible thing. — Paul Theroux

I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler. — Paul Theroux

One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone. — 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

A French traveler with a sore throat is a wonderful thing to behold, but it takes more than tonsillitis to prevent a Frenchman from boasting. — Paul Theroux

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride. — Paul Theroux

Basically, what you find out is the limits of your patience and your strength and your capacity to adapt. You find that out in travel and being alone and being tested. So that's a great thing. — Paul Theroux

Painters paint outdoors, or in rooms full of people; they paint their lovers, alone, naked; they paint and eat; they paint and listen to the radio. It is a soothing way of doing your job. — Paul Theroux

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. — Paul Theroux

...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists. — 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

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

One of the upsides of tourism is that people begin to take themselves a little more seriously (and think their) culture is worth something. So rather than disparaging the local culture, they vitalize it. — Paul Theroux

If people are driving you around to look at animals, that's wonderful. That's educational, but it's not necessarily enlightening and you're not finding out much about yourself. — Paul Theroux

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

Truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes. — Paul Theroux

Writers are painful friends, and they are seldom friendly with others. They are insecure in the presence of other writers. Composers of certain kinds of music are the same--tormented and intolerant. Yet some arts not only make the artist social but make him depend upon sociability in order to succeed. Painting is one. — Paul Theroux

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

Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter. — Paul Theroux

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think. — Paul Theroux

A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler. Nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness. — Paul Theroux

All politicians, even the most idealistic ones, are looking for money, sucking up to rich people. — Paul Theroux

The more you write, the more you're capable of writing. — Paul Theroux

Bogotá seemed a cruel towering place, like an eagles' nest now inhabited by vultures and their dying prey. — Paul Theroux

It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory. — Paul Theroux

When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home. — Paul Theroux

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves. — Paul Theroux

When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost. — Paul Theroux

It's not fashionable but I like to spit out of the window of a moving train. — Paul Theroux

To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it's a paradox of this sort of parallel life. A safari is an expensive experience and it's adjacent to a place where people are having a very tough time. — Paul Theroux

The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace. — Paul Theroux

Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer-a mediocre poet. — Paul Theroux

The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given. — Paul Theroux

Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall. — Paul Theroux

I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster. — Paul Theroux

I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness. — Paul Theroux

There has to be a measure of difficulty or problem-solving in travel for it to be worthwhile. — Paul Theroux

There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable. — Paul Theroux

Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past. — Paul Theroux

Life Lessons by Paul Theroux

1. Paul Theroux teaches us to embrace the unknown and to be open to new experiences. He encourages us to be curious and explore the world around us, as well as to take risks and challenge ourselves.
2. He also reminds us to be mindful of our actions and to think about how they will impact others. He emphasizes the importance of understanding different cultures and respecting different perspectives.
3. Lastly, Paul Theroux emphasizes the importance of resilience and perseverance in the face of adversity. He encourages us to never give up and to keep pushing forward, no matter how difficult the journey may be.