Quote

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

Paul Theroux

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Memorable
Travel
Retrospect
Glamorous

More quotes by Paul Theroux

Image
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
Image
Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.
Paul Theroux
Image
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
Image
Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
Paul Theroux
Image
Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
Paul Theroux
Image
My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.
Paul Theroux
Image
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 Theroux
Image
...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
Paul Theroux
Image
Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
Paul Theroux
Image
Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure.
Paul Theroux
Image
When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen.
Paul Theroux
Image
The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
Paul Theroux
Image
Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
Paul Theroux
Image
Travel is about failure or overcoming obstacles, overcoming failures. When a traveler is having lots of good luck, that is not a happy book. That's a book you say, well, I don't need that. I want a life lesson. I want to find out - I want a journey that reflects my life.
Paul Theroux
Image
Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I've ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare.
Paul Theroux
Image
A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
Paul Theroux
Image
Tibet has a very proud people but it's culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It's like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it's gone.
Paul Theroux
Image
To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it's a paradox of this sort of parallel life. A safari is an expensive experience and it's adjacent to a place where people are having a very tough time.
Paul Theroux
Image
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
Image
Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
Paul Theroux