Paul Theroux Quotes

The saddest task for the ironist is having to tell the listener that it's a joke, because of course it is never a joke.

We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose.

Little had changed after independence. Jomo Kenyatta’s face hung in a framed portrait in every shop where Queen Elizabeth’s had been. Some schools were built, some streets renamed. But educated people...

In the midst of this scoured landscape, on a suburban street, I saw the church steeple, and Lucille slowed down and pointed, and waved me on. As I passed her to enter the parking lot, I thanked her, a...

Colonialism oppressed and subverted Africans and remade them as scavengers, pleaders, and servants

It takes a certain specialist’s dedication to travel in squalid cities and fetid slums, among the utterly dependant poor, who have lost nearly all of their traditions, and most of their habitat. You n...

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

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.

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

I said I was a stranger here. Ain’t no strangers here, baby, she said, and gave me a merry smile.

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

In Cairo, there was a thin line between pestering and hospitality – indeed, they often amounted to the same thing, and although there were plenty of beggars there was little thievery.

He used the word savages with affection, as if he liked them a little for it. In his nature was a respect for wildness. He saw it as a personal challenge, something that could be put right with an ide...

I turned to the flyleaf and wrote: Two classes: both uncomfortable and dirty. No privacy, no relief. Constant stopping and starting, broken engine, howling passengers. On days like this I wonder why I...

And then there are the laziest and most presumptuous of people, those who can read but who don’t bother, who live in the smuggest ignorance and seem to me dangerous.

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.

I did not share their joy or feel very kindly toward any of them,

Whenever an art form—music, book, drama, song—is dragged into the seminar rooms, it is finished as a force. Nothing is more deadly than the anatomizing of scholarship, since the study of art, any art—...

Thought of Almeida Garrett, the mid-nineteenth-century Portuguese traveler and philosopher. An inspiration to me, Garrett had taken a trip in his own country, chronicled in Travels in My Homeland (Via...

Sometimes I miss Boston', I said. It was a timid confession. I missed it every day - its space, its familiar streets and smells. I missed the laughter, I missed the feel of American money which was li...