Paul Theroux Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Paul Theroux's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Film writer Paul Theroux's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 187 quotes on this page collected since April 10, 1941! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • 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 (2012). “The Lower River”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.

    Pain   Writing   People  
  • Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

  • I am happy being what I am.

    Paul Theroux (2004). “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town”, p.198, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.

    Paul Theroux (2009). “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar”, p.103, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • You can't save the rhinos and you can't preserve a culture. I'm very pessimistic. Once it's gone, it's over.

    Source: www.usatoday.com
  • 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.

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

    Paul Theroux (2006). “The Great Railway Bazaar”, p.350, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

    Book  
    Paul Theroux (2006). “The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific”, p.36, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • 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.

    Book   People  
    Source: www.pbs.org
  • 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 (2006). “The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain”, p.57, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it.

  • 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.

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

    Paul Theroux (2014). “The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas”, p.50, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Reading liberates you. You could know about the world through reading.

    Reading  
    Source: www.pbs.org
  • My greatest inspiration is memory.

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

    Paul Theroux (1976). “The great railway bazaar: by train through Asia”
  • Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

    Paul Theroux (2006). “The Great Railway Bazaar”, p.229, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.

  • 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 (2006). “The Great Railway Bazaar”, p.9, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • 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.

    Book   Reading   Writing  
    "Fiction in the Age of E-Books". "The Atlantic" Interview, www.theatlantic.com. 2010.
  • 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.

    People  
    Source: www.usatoday.com
  • 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 (2011). “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town”, p.66, Penguin UK
  • 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 (2001). “Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings”, p.52, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.

    Book   Reading  
    Paul Theroux (2011). “The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road”, p.6, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • 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 (1986). “Sunrise with Seamonsters”, p.309, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.

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

    Paul Theroux (2014). “Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents”, p.180, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.

    Book  
    Interview with Michael Shapiro, www.sfgate.com. May 28, 2011.
  • Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 187 quotes from the Film writer Paul Theroux, starting from April 10, 1941! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!