Paul Theroux Quotes

The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

If you're really in the process of photographing, you are absolutely aware. You are looking.

I regularly take my entrepreneurship students out walking because I want to get them in the habit of noticing and thinking about what they notice. They have to leave their phones behind to learn the basic lesson: Be where you are.

I didn't hate being 60 as much as I had 50.

The best thing anybody ever told me about acting - and I think it's probably true for life, generally - is listen. You've really got to watch, and you've really got to listen. Not see and hear.

I'm not one to be paying too much attention to what another dude's doing.

When we turn on our observation capabilities, we become much more in the moment and much more powerful. Psychic powers have been known to develop from consistent practice of paying attention. It's available to us all. It's all in what we choose to practice.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

I've been playing the father of teenagers for years. People always thought that I was 40 when I was 26. Once you lose your hair, they're like "Oh! He's really old now."

There are only two periods in a woman's life when she hopes to be taken for older than she is, under sixteen and over ninety.

A woman isn't as old as she thinks she is. She's as old as men think she is.

A need to concentrate on each sound, so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower.

Guy Nearing told us it's a good idea when hunting mushrooms to have a pleasant goal, a waterfall for instance, and, having reached it, to return another way. When, however, we're obliged to go and come back by the same path, returning we notice mushrooms we hadn't noticed going out.

Asleep, he looked a lot younger than going-on-seventeen, but I had noticed that Johnny looked younger when he was asleep too, so I figured everyone did. Maybe people are younger when they are asleep.

It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.

Look with all your eyes, look.

Al Roker said I am 80 years 'young'; it's like saying Al Roker is 320 pounds 'thin'.

For Age is not alone of time, or we should never see men old and bent at forty and men young at seventy-three.

Art is born in attention.

If you can train your senses to perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock, what is to stop you for training them to 'slow down' when you look at a tree or a puddle?

I think I've always looked older than I am. I hope that's going to work in my favor when I get older.

But I suppose there's a lot to see everywhere, if only you keep your eyes open.

A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a little bit more intention, you see it.

Do not look too far for you will see nothing.

What you focus on grows. What you concentrate on is what you see more of in your life.