Quote

My greatest inspiration is memory.

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
Memory
Memories
Inspiration
Greatest

More quotes by Paul Theroux

Image
He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.
Paul Theroux
Image
When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost.
Paul Theroux
Image
Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
Paul Theroux
Image
Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
Paul Theroux
Image
One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
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 gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.
Paul Theroux
Image
I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.
Paul Theroux
Image
The journey, not the arrival, matters the voyage, not the landing.
Paul Theroux
Image
Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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
The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
Paul Theroux
Image
Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
Paul Theroux
Image
The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
Paul Theroux
Image
The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
Paul Theroux
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.
Paul Theroux
Image
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
Image
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