442 Quotes by Paul Theroux

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.

Airplanes have dulled and desensitized us; we are encumbered, like lovers in a suit of armor.

My father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn't know what he did. But my kids were privy to the ups and downs of a writer's life.

You may not know it but I'm no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in.

The biggest surprise was that a country like Angola, that has so much money, that produces so much oil, would be in such a mess and so difficult to travel in. Something is almost cursed in striking oil. It's like the lottery winner who ends up broke.

My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.

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

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

You can't want to be a writer. You have to be one.