Paul Theroux Quotes

When I was in school, I used to look out the window and see the big red double-deck buses driving by. It just looked so free.

Growing up in the hot Last Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free. I would daydream about traveling the world, living in a place where it snowed, and I would picture all of the stories that I would go on to tell.

Where ever I am I always find myself looking out the window wishing I was somewhere else.

The story of 'Highway' is completely about travel. It is about the fascination of travel to an extent that I don't want to even reach the destination and also being away from society gives you a certain view of the society, so that was the intention of the film.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

There are so many different reasons as to why I love riding trains. But I think ultimately it's the romantic feeling of it. There's something about it that just transports me into old films.

Travel is impossible, but daydreaming about travel is easy.

The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood

I want to get away, I want to fly away. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Please," she whispered as she opened the book, "please get me out of here just for an hour or so, please take me far, far away

Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything, without anguish, death, winter waiting along it with their eyes open through the dew.

She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.

I'd stare up at the sky and just dream a lot. Still do. I dreamed that I didn't belong here, that I was going to travel a lot.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

For years I drove cross-country, back and forth a dozen times, sometimes on book tour, sometimes just to get lost and found.

I remember just lying in the grass, staring at the clouds, wondering where they drifted off to after they floated over Texas. I never would have imagined that one day I would follow one of those clouds and find myself in Hollywood.

I really wish we could stay longer in the countries we visit, but I've been lucky to have visited most of them before, because I've done a tremendous amount of travel.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

I think a lot of nice things happen when you're driving, or when you're on a plane, or whatever. There's a certain freedom that comes along with motion.

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.

I longed from a tiny child to get away on my own. When I was five, I walked out along the sands from Redcar, nearly all the way to Hartlepool.

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.

I haven't found anywhere in the world where I want to be all the time. The best of my life is the moving. I look forward to going.

I've been a traveller, but I don't travel so much now. I'm trying to do it vicariously through my writing. I'm trying to write books that will draw readers away from their lives but send them back in a more awakened way.