442 Quotes by Paul Theroux

And father said “I never wanted this. I’m sick of everyone pretending to be old Dan Beavers in his L. L. Bean moccasins, and his Dubbelwares, and his Japanese bucksaw – all these fake frontiersmen with their chuck wagons full of Twinkies and Wonderbread and aerosol cheese spread. Get out the Duraflame log and the plastic cracker barrel, Dan, and let’s talk self-sufficiency!

Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books.

January snow lay thick on the ground – crusty, pitted, and hardened, some of it like the bubbly honeycomb of air-dried sea foam in the tide wrack down at the beach, the sort of snow that stays so long you get used to the intrusion of that world of uninvited white, a hooded subverted landscape, sparkling in the low flame of a sallow sunrise on a winter morning.

I never stay with people and I never look people up when I travel. I depend more on just chance meetings. The advantage is that people don’t know who I am. I meet people casually and they’re not doing me a big favor because I’m going to write something.

I don’t think that it’s possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it’s simple.

Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I’ve ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare.

That was my Malawian epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. All the others, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.

Travel works best when you’re forced to come to terms with the place you’re in.

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation – experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.