The traveler’s boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience – shocking though it may seem at the time – is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.

— Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux Quotes

The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again.

— Paul Theroux

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

— Paul Theroux

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.

— Paul Theroux

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

— Paul Theroux

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

— Paul Theroux

The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.

— Paul Theroux

Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn’t mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.

— Paul Theroux

Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.

— Paul Theroux

Painters paint outdoors, or in rooms full of people; they paint their lovers, alone, naked; they paint and eat; they paint and listen to the radio. It is a soothing way of doing your job.

— Paul Theroux

I think I understand passion. Love is something else.

— Paul Theroux

When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home.

— Paul Theroux

I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss’s The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century’s most mysterious writers.

— Paul Theroux

You must not judge people by their country. In South America, it is always wise to judge people by their altitude.

— Paul Theroux

I sought trains; I found passengers.

— Paul Theroux

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

— Paul Theroux

Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.

— Paul Theroux

Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence.

— Paul Theroux

In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.

— Paul Theroux

Painters strike me as having warm uncomplicated friendships and probably more natural generosity than the practitioners of any other art. Perhaps this is because painting is such a portable, flexible thing.

— Paul Theroux

Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.

— Paul Theroux
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