Paul Theroux Quotes

I just think political correctness is crap.

I feel growing up in Mumbai is an advantage, as we grow up speaking so many languages that when we go abroad, it becomes easier to learn new languages.

In my time, you needed to speak a little Italian, and that was it.

When I first came to this country, I didn't know how to speak English.

Always when you go to a new country and they teach you bad words, you just say them without knowing the value and people look at you because you didn't know that value of them.

I haven't learned to be politically correct yet.

I grew up in a world where the majority of people were black, so that wasn't the defining quality of anyone. When you're describing someone, you don't start out with 'he's black, he's white.'

I took about four or five years of French in high school, but I definitely don't speak French as well as I thought I did then.

Free speech is one of the most important things to me, but I think it gets confusing when it comes to offense. Because for one, just because you have the right to say anything, it doesn't mean you have to.

I'm fully conscious all the time that I'm an American Negro, because it's part of my life. But I also know that if I want to say, 'I see a bus full of people,' I don't have to say, 'I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people.'

I went to study in Spain for a year after school. It was either that or Russian, so I went for the easy option. I love Spain and go quite regularly. I've done a bit of Spanish theatre.

I'm not saying the N word anymore.

When I went to Germany, all I knew were German swear words.

I lived a very, very Middle Eastern life until I was in my early 20s. It was very sheltered.

I've no problems with cuss words. All of us use them. Those who say they don't are lying. People can tolerate English cuss words but find the Hindi ones a bit revolting.

I have always wanted to make a series of films which would be like an 'emotional history' that conveys what it feels like to live through history as an experience rather than a grand story. It would be about the relationship between the tiny fragments and moments of personal experience, and the continual backdrop of big events.

I was an Indian with zero sense of caste till I was 20. That's an unusual privilege but it came out of the fact that I was a middle-class Bengali.

My father-in-law, Barney Rawlings, spent a couple of months hiding out in France in 1944, frantically memorizing a few French words to pass himself off as a Frenchman, but his ordeal had not inspired in me any action until I started taking a French class.

What we had on was BBC Asian Network and Bollywood sound-tracks - they were my reference points. But of course, where I grew up, I was one of two Indian guys in my school, and I didn't really have anyone else to share that with.

I started watching movies in theatres very late as my family was against it.

I do think that when you're specifically working in a country like South Africa, you have to be able to be aware of the cultural truth of what people are raised in and believe in and how they function within their society.

We don't grow up in vacuums. We grow up in societies.

Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us.

I never thought people would be mortally offended by the sounds I was making.

You may find somebody refreshing until they drop the N-word on you and then you're no longer feeling refreshed, you're just feeling offended. And where we draw that line as a society is sort of akin to what the Supreme Court said on pornography, you know, you know it when you see it. And it's different for each person.