Top 180 Paul Theroux Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.”

— Paul Theroux

Featured in: Journey Quotes, Adventure Quotes

2. “I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.”

— Paul Theroux

Featured in: Productivity Quotes

3. “Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.”

— Paul Theroux

Featured in: Winter Quotes

4. “Reading is also a journey. It’s a process of discovery.”

— Paul Theroux

5. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”

— Paul Theroux

6. “The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing.”

— Paul Theroux

7. “You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back.”

— Paul Theroux

8. “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

9. “Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life.”

— Paul Theroux

Featured in: Destination Quotes

10. “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 friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown...”

— Paul Theroux

11. “It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.”

— Paul Theroux

12. “Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.”

— Paul Theroux

13. “I am happy being what I am.”

— Paul Theroux

14. “Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.”

— Paul Theroux

15. “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

16. “Reading liberates you. You could know about the world through reading.”

— Paul Theroux

17. “Tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash – suspicious, unbelieving, and incurious.”

— Paul Theroux

18. “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

19. “When I’m writing, I like to travel alone. If you really want to find out about a place, you need to be as free as possible to be spontaneous. You also need to be lonely, because loneliness is a great teacher, too.”

— Paul Theroux

20. “In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan.”

— Paul Theroux

21. “Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.”

— Paul Theroux

22. “All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting.”

— Paul Theroux

23. “Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.”

— Paul Theroux

24. “The more you write, the more you’re capable of writing.”

— Paul Theroux

25. “Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation – experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.”

— Paul Theroux

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

— Paul Theroux

27. “Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.”

— Paul Theroux

28. “Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.”

— Paul Theroux

29. “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.”

— Paul Theroux

30. “It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.”

— Paul Theroux

31. “I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don’t want to relax. I want to see something.”

— Paul Theroux

32. “I sought trains; I found passengers.”

— Paul Theroux

33. “The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space.”

— Paul Theroux

34. “Tibet has a very proud people but it’s culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It’s like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it’s gone.”

— Paul Theroux

35. “Basically, what you find out is the limits of your patience and your strength and your capacity to adapt. You find that out in travel and being alone and being tested. So that’s a great thing.”

— Paul Theroux

36. “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

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

— Paul Theroux

38. “The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.”

— Paul Theroux

39. “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.”

— Paul Theroux

40. “The Swahili word safari means journey, it has nothing to do with animals, someone ‘on safari’ is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.”

— Paul Theroux

41. “The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.”

— Paul Theroux

42. “Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.”

— Paul Theroux

43. “You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.”

— Paul Theroux

44. “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

45. “Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books.”

— Paul Theroux

46. “Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.”

— Paul Theroux

47. “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.”

— Paul Theroux

48. “I don’t think that it’s possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it’s simple.”

— Paul Theroux

49. “Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.”

— Paul Theroux

50. “Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.”

— Paul Theroux