You 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 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.
More Paul Theroux Quotes
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The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
PAUL THEROUX -
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 -
One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
PAUL THEROUX -
…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
PAUL THEROUX -
It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
PAUL THEROUX -
One 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 THEROUX -
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 -
You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
PAUL THEROUX -
I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom.
PAUL THEROUX -
Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
PAUL THEROUX -
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
PAUL THEROUX -
Someone 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 -
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 -
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
PAUL THEROUX -
My greatest inspiration is memory.
PAUL THEROUX