Quotes by Paul Theroux

“The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume”

“If you find an Australian indoors, its a fair bet that he will have a glass in his hand.”

“God bless America. God save the Queen. God defend New Zealand and thank Christ for Australia.”

“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”

“Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.”

“It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled”

“You define a good flight by negatives: you didnt get hijacked, you didnt crash, you didnt throw up, you werent late, you werent nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.”

“The train passed fruit farms and clean villages and Swiss cycling in kerchiefs, calendar scenes that you admire for a moment before feeling an urge to move on to a new month”

“I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better”

“It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians”

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..

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.

...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

Nature is crooked. I wanted right angles and straight lines. Ice! Oh, why do they all drip? You cut yourself opening a can of tuna fish and you die. One puncture in your foot and your life leaks out through your toe. What are they for, moose antlers? Get down on all fours and live. Youre protected on your hands and knees. Its either that or wings.

I had cooperated. I could not have refused. I was smitten with her, half in love but also afraid, because in my life (and she seemed to know this) I had not loved anyone without having been wounded. Love was power and possession, love caused pain: you were never more exposed than when you were in love, never more wounded; possession was an enslavement, something stifling.

I said I didnt think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes - better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry predatory poor. All the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to assure their continued prosperity.

The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures -- I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road.