442 Quotes by Paul Theroux

Xian was one of the few exceptions I found. It was genuinely interesting and pretty, and rather a stately and dignified place

He had been sent to nanny me and breathe down my neck. He had been discreet-he had not gotten in my way; but who had asked him to come? Not me.

It is wrong to see a country in a bad mood: you begin to blame the country for your mood and to draw the wrong conclusions.

Using an extremely clever if somewhat fanciful Chinese technique for ensnaring awkward visitors, they insisted that I was too important to travel alone and so stuck me with Mr. Fang.

Transportation in China is always crowded; it is nearly always uncomfortable; it is often a struggle.

The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace

Aliens usually missed the point about England by investing its landscape with the passions of its great literature and it had so seldom been seen plainly, without literary footnotes.

England resembles a ship in its shape' wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in English Traits. He was wrong... England, of course, resembles a pig, with something on its back. Look at it. It is a hurrying pig; its snout is the south-west in Wales, and its reaching trotters are Cornwall, and its rump is East Anglia. The whole of Britain looks like a witch riding on a pig, and these contours - rump and snout and bonnet, and the scowling face of Western Scotland - were my route.

On the sunny day that I spent walking its streets I was reminded that Philadelphia (Mississippi) is still the headquarters of the Mississippi Klan. I easily found the headquarters and the free leaflets. "...It's a Klansman's responsibility to register to vote, campaign, and vote for conservative pro white candidates who will put America first and defend our nation's borders.