Paul Theroux Quotes

Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.

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..

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

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.

In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.

...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

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

- and the mocking realization that money was just colorful crumpled paper, hardly different from a candy wrapper, the market itself little more than a casino.

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.