Top 180 Paul Theroux Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “If people are driving you around to look at animals, that’s wonderful. That’s educational, but it’s not necessarily enlightening and you’re not finding out much about yourself.”

— Paul Theroux

152. “The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away.”

— Paul Theroux

153. “Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn’t say that I’m a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels – and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.”

— Paul Theroux

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

— Paul Theroux

155. “Travel works best when you’re forced to come to terms with the place you’re in.”

— Paul Theroux

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

— Paul Theroux

157. “You can’t write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.”

— Paul Theroux

158. “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

159. “You travel all over,” the woman said. “Do you write about your travels?” I said, Yes, I did. Articles. Books. Whatever. “You must write Paul Theroux-type travel books,” she said. I said, Exactly, and told her why.”

— Paul Theroux

160. “People will tell you, “What’s the use? What’s the point of reading novels and poetry?” They’ll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books will make you thoughtful, and they might even make you happy. They will certainly help you to become more civilized.”

— Paul Theroux

161. “It seemed that his anger was partly theatrical, that he was amping up his shouts to intimidate me.”

— Paul Theroux

162. “All solitary travel offers a sort of special license allowing you to be anyone you want to be.”

— Paul Theroux

163. “An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.”

— Paul Theroux

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

— Paul Theroux

165. “Nothing is more satisfying in travel than to land in a place and assume an occupation, even a temporary one, as a teacher.”

— Paul Theroux

166. “A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them – jobs, money, pride.”

— Paul Theroux

167. “When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I’ve gone on. I certainly don’t feel I need his approval, although maybe that’s because I’m confident that I’ve got it.”

— Paul Theroux

168. “The Colombians are good-tempered people. They are used to waiting for buses that are late, used to riding buses and trains that do not arrive.”

— Paul Theroux

169. “You define a good flight by negatives: you didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.”

— Paul Theroux

170. “January snow lay thick on the ground – crusty, pitted, and hardened, some of it like the bubbly honeycomb of air-dried sea foam in the tide wrack down at the beach, the sort of snow that stays so long you get used to the intrusion of that world of uninvited white, a hooded subverted landscape, sparkling in the low flame of a sallow sunrise on a winter morning.”

— Paul Theroux

171. “One of the grandest creations of the New South was a mythical concept of an Old South.” What people take to be an epoch was a matter of mere decades of pretension and an exercise in irrational nostalgia.”

— Paul Theroux

172. “Normal, nice people don’t become writers.”

— Paul Theroux

173. “In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.”

— Paul Theroux

174. “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.”

— Paul Theroux

175. “The monotony of staying in one place is the best thing for writing a novel. Having regular habits, a kind of security, but especially no big surprises, no shocks.”

— Paul Theroux

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

— Paul Theroux

177. “When she was done, I talked to her a little – and I was the only one.”

— Paul Theroux

178. “And that is all anyone can do, try to be honest about what he feels, what he’s seen or thinks he’s seen.”

— Paul Theroux

179. “A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It’s not about inventing.”

— Paul Theroux

180. “Time is a factor in travel, one of the most crucial.”

— Paul Theroux

181. “So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.”

— Paul Theroux

182. “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.”

— Paul Theroux

183. “But art should require no instrument but memory.”

— Paul Theroux

184. “The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate’s career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.”

— Paul Theroux

185. “That was my Malawian epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. All the others, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.”

— Paul Theroux

186. “To travel unconnected, away from anyone’s gaze or reach, is bliss.”

— Paul Theroux

187. “I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.”

— Paul Theroux

188. “Truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes.”

— Paul Theroux

189. “One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century? I’ll tell you the worst one. People can’t stand to be alone. Can’t tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the crapsheets and say ‘Please call me up!’ It’s sick. People hate their own company – they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the way their faces look. Maybe that’s a clue to the whole thing...”

— Paul Theroux

190. “I wanted to find a new self in a distant place, and new things to care about.”

— Paul Theroux

191. “Last days? Don’t they know? These are the traits of all days, every day, everywhere.”

— Paul Theroux

192. “The mist, the rain, and cold, low clouds gave the train a feeling of early morning, a chill and predawn dimness that lasted until noon.”

— Paul Theroux

193. “If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.”

— Paul Theroux

194. “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.”

— Paul Theroux

195. “The sunset’s fire was tangled in leaden clouds, and the pillars of rain supporting the toppling thunderheads were very close;.”

— Paul Theroux

196. “The only cure for seasickness is to sit on the shady side of an old brick church in the country.”

— Paul Theroux

197. “I believe in every possible manifestation of spiritual strangeness. I believe in all possible escapes. The only thing I cannot endure is reality, whatever it may be. I believe that the writer is defined by the constant necessity of creating a world, to depart from this world. Literature is more concerned with misery than with happiness. Writing is directly related to frustration. It is a reflection of personal desperation. The writer is profoundly disgusted with his reality.”

— Paul Theroux

198. “It seems to me that there is always something luminous in the face of a person in the act of reading.”

— Paul Theroux

199. “I cannot think of any writer of stature in English who has not shown a knowledge of the Bible.”

— Paul Theroux