Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Great
Places
Idealised
Memories
Unstated
Looking
Exemplify
Perfect
Happiest
Home
Versions
Reason
Indeed
Find
Memory
Might
Travel
More quotes by Paul Theroux
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
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
You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
Paul Theroux
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
It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
Paul Theroux
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
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
Paul Theroux
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
Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.
Paul Theroux
No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.
Paul Theroux
There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.
Paul Theroux
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
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
Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
Paul Theroux
Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
Paul Theroux
People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.
Paul Theroux
Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
Paul Theroux
The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again.
Paul Theroux
It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
Paul Theroux
A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
Paul Theroux
