Quotes by Paul Theroux

About Paul Theroux:

Paul Edward Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast on which the 1986 movie is based.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I'd like to identify who it is. After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I thought: And who am I? Please tell me who I am and what I'm doing.

Paul Theroux

I had cooperated. I could not have refused. I was smitten with her, half in love but also afraid, because in my life (and she seemed to know this) I had not loved anyone without having been wounded. Love was power and possession, love caused pain: yo...

Paul Theroux

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

Paul Theroux

You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back

Paul Theroux

What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, butterflies settled in long fluffy tracts. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if yo...

Paul Theroux

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

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

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

Paul Theroux

So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight...

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

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.

Paul Theroux

The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures -- I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road.

Paul Theroux

As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere-the truer shout is not "Never again" but "Again and again.

Paul Theroux

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

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, the reason why luxury cruises and gre...

Paul Theroux

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.

Paul Theroux

Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my ...

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

I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.

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 tediu...

Paul Theroux

I wanted the Peace Corps to be something very vague and unorganized, and to a large extent it was. It did not run smoothly. The consequence was that we were left alone.

Paul Theroux

Author Bio

  • NamePaul Theroux
  • DescriptionAmerican travel writer and novelist
  • AliasesPaul Edward Theroux
  • BornApril 10, 1941
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • AwardsJames Tait Black Memorial Prize