Paul Theroux Quotes

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think.

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

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,...

A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about having a very bad time; having a miserable time, even better.

One of the things the 'Tao of Travel' shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about...

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.

I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what...

It was just a version of Rimbaud in Harar: the exile, a selfish beast with modest fantasies of power, secretly enjoying a life of beer drinking and scribbling and occasional mythomania in a nice clima...

All that light, instead of giving an impression of warmth and activity, merely exposed its emptiness in a deadening blaze.

An aimless joy is a pure joy, I said, quoting Yeats.

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 bu...

At my

Borges, who said, Defeat has a dignity which noisy victory does not deserve.

But so little has changed. This is practically the same country I left thirty-five years ago. Maybe worse. The government doesn’t even care enough to help you.’ This was too broad a subject. She said...

England resembles a ship in its shape' wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in English Traits. He was wrong... England, of course, resembles a pig, with something on its back. Look at it. It is a hurrying pig; i...

How nice it would be, I thought, if someone reading the narrative of my African trip felt the same, that it was the next best thing to being there

I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, Thoreau wrote in his essay Life Without Principle, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with trivia...

KIAJIAN

One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy— at the time, not afterwards. Most people don’t realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happines...

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 is s...