I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
PAUL THEROUXI think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
PAUL THEROUXSometimes people read a book in order to not go on a trip. You read a book instead of going on the trip. And so the travel writer is doing the traveling for you.
PAUL THEROUXYou can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
PAUL THEROUXIf 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 THEROUXIt is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
PAUL THEROUXThe 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 THEROUXSomeone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it.
PAUL THEROUX…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
PAUL THEROUXIt 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 THEROUXI always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom.
PAUL THEROUXWriting … is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
PAUL THEROUXAnimal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
PAUL THEROUXI 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 THEROUXIt 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 THEROUXOne of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
PAUL THEROUXYou think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.
PAUL THEROUX