Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux

"The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming."
41 Quotes
"The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming."
Paul Theroux
"What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself."
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
"Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in."
Paul Theroux
"Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going."
Paul Theroux
"Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine."
Paul Theroux
"I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about."
Paul Theroux
"Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tedium, and this is why I choose to travel alone."
Paul Theroux
"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
"At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom."
Paul Theroux
"Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening."
Paul Theroux
"Last days? Don't they know? These are the traits of all days, every day, everywhere."
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. That is its purpose..."
Paul Theroux
"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. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars... Anything is possible on a train..."
Paul Theroux
"If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay at home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to travel than ever before: to look closer, to dig deeper, to sort the authentic from the fake; to verify, to smell, to touch, to taste, to hear and sometimes - importantly - to suffer the effects of this curiosity."
Paul Theroux
"In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough."
Paul Theroux
"If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there."
Paul Theroux
"Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect."
Paul Theroux
"Travel is glamorous only in retrospect."
Paul Theroux
"In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed."
Paul Theroux
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