442 Quotes by Paul Theroux

There are two worlds: the world of the tourist and the world of everyone else. Often they’re side by side. But the tourist doesn’t actually see how people live.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It’s like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster.

The three biggest funerals in Alabama history define the state’s contending loyalties, I was told: George Wallace’s, Martin Luther King’s, and Bear Bryant’s.

One of the grandest creations of the New South was a mythical concept of an Old South.” What people take to be an epoch was a matter of mere decades of pretension and an exercise in irrational nostalgia.

Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Time is a factor in travel, one of the most crucial.

I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss’s The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century’s most mysterious writers.

To travel unconnected, away from anyone’s gaze or reach, is bliss.

Why do things get weaker and worse? Why don’t they get better? Because we accept that they fall apart! But they don’t have to – they could last forever. Why do things get more expensive? Any fool can see that they should get cheaper as technology gets more efficient. It’s despair to accept the senility of obsolescence...