Quotes.gg
Home
Tags
Terms and Conditions
Privacy Policy
Imprint
Made by
Last Media
Paul Theroux
Popular Posts
#Tags
Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine.
- Paul Theroux
#Doctor
#Medical
#Mind
#School
#Time
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
#Finding
#Places
#Say
#Travel
#Who
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
#Connected
#Isolation
#Phone
#Solitude
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
#Love
#Me
#Obsession
#Understand
#Us
One of the things the 'Tao of Travel' shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them.
- Paul Theroux
#About
#Tell
#Things
#Travel
#Who
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
#Gun
#Life
#Me
#My Life
#Travel
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
#Children
#Life
#Love
#Thinking
#Travel
Travel magazines are just one cupcake after another. They're not about travel. The travel magazine is, in fact, about the opposite of travel. It's about having a nice time on a honeymoon, or whatever.
- Paul Theroux
#Magazine
#Nice
#Time
#Travel
#Whatever
Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.
- Paul Theroux
#Book
#Culture
#Me
#Serious
#World
The Trans-Siberian Express is like a cruise across an oceanic landscape. I've done it three times.
- Paul Theroux
#Done
#Express
#Landscape
#Like
#Three
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
- Paul Theroux
#Also
#Friendship
#Help
#Person
#Weakness
Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tedium, and this is why I choose to travel alone.
- Paul Theroux
#Alone
#Details
#Food
#Patience
#Travel
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
- Paul Theroux
#Contracts
#Feeling
#First
#Mind
#Travel
The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It's a passion. And I can't understand people who don't want to travel.
- Paul Theroux
#Curiosity
#Passion
#People
#Travel
#Want
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
#Food
#Good
#Grateful
#Late
#Travel
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
- Paul Theroux
#Art
#Death
#Life
#Love
#Passion
Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.
- Paul Theroux
#Grace
#Hawaii
#Mind
#State
The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
- Paul Theroux
#Good Manners
#Good
#Made
#Manners
#Them
It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.
- Paul Theroux
#Alone
#Back
#Fall
#Nothing
#Own
Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.
- Paul Theroux
#Anything Is Possible
#Good
#Great
#Night
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
#Live
#Look
#Tourism
#Understand
#Why
The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
- Paul Theroux
#Australian
#Book
#Etiquette
#Slim
#Very
Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.
- Paul Theroux
#Chances
#Fiction
#Life
#Second
#Us
Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.
- Paul Theroux
#Joy
#Maine
#More
#Soul
#Winter
Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
- Paul Theroux
#Preparation
#Recovery
#Season
#Winter
I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.
- Paul Theroux
#Better
#Cannot
#Days
#Make
#Strive
Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.
- Paul Theroux
#Being
#Gain
#Never
#Reputation
#Will
I am happy being what I am.
- Paul Theroux
#Am
#Being
#Happy
#I Am Happy
#I Am
The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the whole point of work, of life, of love.'
- Paul Theroux
#Hope
#Life
#Love
#Moment
#Work
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
- Paul Theroux
#Glamorous
#Only
#Retrospect
#Travel
Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
- Paul Theroux
#Been
#Going
#Know
#Travel
#Where
Load More
Your experience on this site will be improved by allowing cookies.
Allow cookies