442 Quotes by Paul Theroux

I’m constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.

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...

Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don’t.

Travel is about failure or overcoming obstacles, overcoming failures. When a traveler is having lots of good luck, that is not a happy book. That’s a book you say, well, I don’t need that. I want a life lesson. I want to find out – I want a journey that reflects my life.

It’s not fashionable but I like to spit out of the window of a moving train.

I’m a tourist, a glorified tourist. I’m not doing it to have a good time or to lie in the sun.

Tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash – suspicious, unbelieving, and incurious.

They say that if the Swiss had designed these mountains they’d be rather flatter.

An aimless joy is a pure joy,” I said, quoting Yeats.