Quotes from Paul Theroux

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars... Anything is possible on a train...

Perjalanan itu bersifat pribadi. Kalaupun aku berjalan bersamamu, perjalananmu bukanlah perjalananku.

The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures -- I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road.

I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.

People will tell you, "What's the use? What's the point of reading novels and poetry?" They'll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books will make you thoughtful, and they might even make you happy. They will certainly help you to become more civilized.

One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century? I'll tell you the worst one. People can't stand to be alone. Can't tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the crapsheets and say 'Please call me up!' It's sick. People hate their own company --- they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the way their faces look. Maybe that's a clue to the whole thing...

What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, butterflies settled in long fluffy tracts. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if you drove too fast your tires lost their grip, and some people lost their lives, skidding on butterflies.

The disorder in Yashar's apartment was that comfortable littering and stacking that only another writer can recognize as order - the considered scatter of papers and books a writer builds around himself until it acquires the cozy solidity of a nest.

The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away.

For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.

Solitary people make the best travellers

I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness.

I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

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. That is its purpose...

He was serene, fulfilled, the real thing, the person no one wants to hear about, a happy man.

As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere-the truer shout is not Never again but Again and again.

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.

And then there are the laziest and most presumptuous of people, those who can read but who don't bother, who live in the smuggest ignorance and seem to me dangerous.

Borges, who said, "Defeat has a dignity which noisy victory does not deserve.

There are few things more abrasive to the human spirit, even in Patagonia, than someone standing behind you chomping and sucking ice cubes.

Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, I went there---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- and it wasn't like that. I say, Because I am not you.

A slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window and disappears and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves.

Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse. Travel gives you glimpses of the past and the future, your own and other people's.