Quotes from Paul Theroux

Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.

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

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Basically, what you find out is the limits of your patience and your strength and your capacity to adapt. You find that out in travel and being alone and being tested. So that's a great thing.

It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.

I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple.

There has to be a measure of difficulty or problem-solving in travel for it to be worthwhile.

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.

Sometimes people read a book in order to not go on a trip. You read a book instead of going on the trip. And so the travel writer is doing the traveling for you.

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.

Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.

There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go.

Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, it needs an angle, it needs a 'sound bite.

I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble.

The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.

I think I understand passion. Love is something else.

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

The place that interests me most, actually, is the United States. I've realized that I haven't traveled much in the States. There's a lot to see.

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.

A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about having a very bad time; having a miserable time, even better.

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

You can't separate the people from the places - although I sometimes like traveling in places where there are no people.

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