Top 180 Paul Theroux Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.”

— Paul Theroux

52. “Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.”

— Paul Theroux

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

— Paul Theroux

54. “I think I understand passion. Love is something else.”

— Paul Theroux

55. “The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace.”

— Paul Theroux

56. “A person who is tired of London is not necessarily tired of life; it might be that he just can’t find a parking place.”

— Paul Theroux

57. “My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.”

— Paul Theroux

58. “I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.”

— Paul Theroux

59. “No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.”

— Paul Theroux

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

— Paul Theroux

61. “I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom.”

— Paul Theroux

62. “I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.”

— Paul Theroux

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

— Paul Theroux

64. “There’s always a way if you’re not in a hurry.”

— Paul Theroux

65. “I don’t look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren’t there, there would be no economy. So I understand why a tourist economy is necessary.”

— Paul Theroux

66. “He regarded himself as an accomplished writer – a clear sign of madness in anyone.”

— Paul Theroux

67. “All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet’s hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man’s way of heading home.”

— Paul Theroux

68. “Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don’t.”

— Paul Theroux

69. “It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory.”

— Paul Theroux

70. “The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.”

— Paul Theroux

71. “The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.”

— Paul Theroux

72. “One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.”

— Paul Theroux

73. “Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I’ve ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare.”

— Paul Theroux

74. “I don’t want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.”

— Paul Theroux

75. “They say that if the Swiss had designed these mountains they’d be rather flatter.”

— Paul Theroux

76. “It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.”

— Paul Theroux

77. “I can’t predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive – no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer’s life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.”

— Paul Theroux

78. “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

79. “And father said “I never wanted this. I’m sick of everyone pretending to be old Dan Beavers in his L. L. Bean moccasins, and his Dubbelwares, and his Japanese bucksaw – all these fake frontiersmen with their chuck wagons full of Twinkies and Wonderbread and aerosol cheese spread. Get out the Duraflame log and the plastic cracker barrel, Dan, and let’s talk self-sufficiency!”

— Paul Theroux

80. “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

81. “I never stay with people and I never look people up when I travel. I depend more on just chance meetings. The advantage is that people don’t know who I am. I meet people casually and they’re not doing me a big favor because I’m going to write something.”

— Paul Theroux

82. “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.”

— Paul Theroux

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

— Paul Theroux

84. “The biggest surprise was that a country like Angola, that has so much money, that produces so much oil, would be in such a mess and so difficult to travel in. Something is almost cursed in striking oil. It’s like the lottery winner who ends up broke.”

— Paul Theroux

85. “When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn’t make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn’t make a phone call. So for six years I didn’t make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.”

— Paul Theroux

86. “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.”

— Paul Theroux

87. “What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you’re not in a hurry.”

— Paul Theroux

88. “A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler. Nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness.”

— Paul Theroux

89. “A French traveler with a sore throat is a wonderful thing to behold, but it takes more than tonsillitis to prevent a Frenchman from boasting.”

— Paul Theroux

90. “You may not know it but I’m no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in.”

— Paul Theroux

91. “There has to be a measure of difficulty or problem-solving in travel for it to be worthwhile.”

— Paul Theroux

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

— Paul Theroux

93. “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

94. “I’m a tourist, a glorified tourist. I’m not doing it to have a good time or to lie in the sun.”

— Paul Theroux

95. “Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.”

— Paul Theroux

96. “It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.”

— Paul Theroux

97. “Suffering has no value, but you have to suffer in order to know that. I never found it easy to travel, yet the difficulty in it made it satisfying because it seemed in that way to resemble the act of writing – groping around in the dark, wandering into the unknown, coming to understand the condition of strangeness.”

— Paul Theroux

98. “I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.”

— Paul Theroux

99. “All politicians, even the most idealistic ones, are looking for money, sucking up to rich people.”

— Paul Theroux

100. “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