Quote

Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life

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
Reaching
Cease
Travel
Becomes
Living
Indistinguishable
Life
Ceases
Rewarding
Destination

More quotes by Paul Theroux

Image
The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space
Paul Theroux
Image
Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.
Paul Theroux
Image
Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
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
...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
Paul Theroux
Image
I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.
Paul Theroux
Image
The biggest surprise was that a country like Angola, that has so much money, that produces so much oil, would be in such a mess and so difficult to travel in. Something is almost cursed in striking oil. It's like the lottery winner who ends up broke.
Paul Theroux
Image
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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
Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
Paul Theroux
Image
If people are driving you around to look at animals, that's wonderful. That's educational, but it's not necessarily enlightening and you're not finding out much about yourself.
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
Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
Paul Theroux
Image
Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.
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
One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
Paul Theroux
Image
Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari Africans don't.
Paul Theroux
Image
Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
Paul Theroux
Image
I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
Paul Theroux
Image
Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
Paul Theroux