Quotes by Paul Theroux

“Nature is crooked. I wanted right angles and straight lines. Ice! Oh, why do they all drip? You cut yourself opening a can of tuna fish and you die. One puncture in your foot and your life leaks ou...”

“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 frie...”

“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.”

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

“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...”

“I said I didn't think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes - better than the rich had ever lived, ...”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy at the time, not afterwards. Most people dont realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happine...”

“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 i...”

“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”

“..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 ...”

“Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”

“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 carp...”

“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 rei...”

“Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists. The tourists at Etosha conjure up a fantastic Africa after their nightly di...”

“If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.”

“In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.”