Quote

In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937 Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan.

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
Next
France
Norway
Years
Unions
Turkeys
Always
Internet
Turkey
Week
Afghanistan
Year
Australia
Five
Soviet
Lasts
Japan
Malaysia
Last
Union
Bolivia

More quotes by 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
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
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
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
It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
Paul Theroux
Image
...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
Paul Theroux
Image
Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
Paul Theroux
Image
I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.
Paul Theroux
Image
Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
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
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
Image
Writers are painful friends, and they are seldom friendly with others. They are insecure in the presence of other writers. Composers of certain kinds of music are the same--tormented and intolerant. Yet some arts not only make the artist social but make him depend upon sociability in order to succeed. Painting is one.
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
I sought trains I found passengers.
Paul Theroux
Image
You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
Paul Theroux
Image
The traveler's boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience - shocking though it may seem at the time - is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.
Paul Theroux
Image
I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.
Paul Theroux
Image
The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.
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
He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.
Paul Theroux