I don’t think that it’s possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it’s simple.
PAUL THEROUXI don’t think that it’s possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it’s simple.
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 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 THEROUXI think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
PAUL THEROUXYou can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
PAUL THEROUXAnimal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
PAUL THEROUXThe Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
PAUL THEROUXMark 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 THEROUXFriendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
PAUL THEROUXIt is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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 THEROUXI always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom.
PAUL THEROUXEven if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
PAUL THEROUXWriting … is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
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 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 THEROUX