Quotes from Paul Theroux

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think.

The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business, but it's the only thing they've been allowed to do.

The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the whole point of work, of life, of love.'

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.

When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home.

It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

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..

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.

Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way

travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.

Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.

You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back

The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life - the homebound writer's irritants. But also being kept waiting is the human conditon.

a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.

All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.