Paul Theroux Quotes

Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.

- Paul Theroux

I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.

- Paul Theroux

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

- Paul Theroux

Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.

- Paul Theroux

Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial.

- Paul Theroux

Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.

- Paul Theroux

Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.

- Paul Theroux

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

- Paul Theroux

What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself.

- Paul Theroux

The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it.

- Paul Theroux

Travel magazines are just one cupcake after another. They're not about travel. The travel magazine is, in fact, about the opposite of travel. It's about having a nice time on a honeymoon, or whatever.

- Paul Theroux

I feel as if my mission is to write, to see, to observe, and I feel lazy if I'm not reaching conclusions. I feel stupid. I feel as if I'm wasting my time.

- Paul Theroux

I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.

- Paul Theroux

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

- Paul Theroux

I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist, but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

- Paul Theroux

I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.

- Paul Theroux

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

- Paul Theroux

The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that equals the Yangtze River, that equals the Nile. We have the greatest cities in the world - among the greatest cities in the world.

- Paul Theroux

My earliest thought, long before I was in high school, was just to go away, get out of my house, get out of my city. I went to Medford High School, but even in grade school and junior high, I fantasized about leaving.

- Paul Theroux

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

- Paul Theroux

I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.

- Paul Theroux

My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.

- Paul Theroux

Dentists seem to me very orderly, businesslike people who appear to become somewhat bored with the routine of their work after a period of time. Perhaps I'm wrong.

- Paul Theroux

I wanted the Peace Corps to be something very vague and unorganized, and to a large extent it was. It did not run smoothly. The consequence was that we were left alone.

- Paul Theroux

An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.

- Paul Theroux

Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.

- Paul Theroux

The place that interests me most, actually, is the United States. I've realized that I haven't traveled much in the States. There's a lot to see.

- Paul Theroux

If you look at a map, you see that Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. It's 17 hours of straight flying from London. It's very far away, and sometimes you feel as if you're on another planet. But I like that. Also, that's ideal for writing.

- Paul Theroux

A place that doesn't welcome tourists, that's really difficult and off the map, is a place I want to see.

- Paul Theroux

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.

- Paul Theroux

I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.

- Paul Theroux

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

- Paul Theroux

The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the whole point of work, of life, of love.'

- Paul Theroux

There are places that I've always wanted to go. First I went to Africa, and when I was there I realized there were places in Africa I really to wanted to visit: The Congo, West Africa, Mombassa. I wanted to see the deep, dark, outlandish places.

- Paul Theroux

Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.

- Paul Theroux

When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.

- Paul Theroux

The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

- Paul Theroux

My record was so bad that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troublemaker and was accepted as a volunteer only after a great deal of explaining and arguing.

- Paul Theroux

I think I am typical in believing that the Peace Corps trained us brilliantly and then did little more except send us into the bush. It was not a bad way of running things.

- Paul Theroux

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.

- Paul Theroux

Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall.

- Paul Theroux

The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.

- Paul Theroux

Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, it needs an angle, it needs a 'sound bite.

- Paul Theroux

I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.

- Paul Theroux

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

- Paul Theroux

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

- Paul Theroux

Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.

- Paul Theroux

I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.

- Paul Theroux

People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.

- Paul Theroux

You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.

- Paul Theroux

The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It's a passion. And I can't understand people who don't want to travel.

- Paul Theroux

The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something - a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unusual is a very sustaining thing in travel.

- Paul Theroux

The idea of traveling in Africa for me is based on going by road or train or bus or whatever and crossing borders. You can't travel easily or at all through some countries.

- Paul Theroux

I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don't want to relax. I want to see something.

- Paul Theroux

I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.

- Paul Theroux

Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tedium, and this is why I choose to travel alone.

- Paul Theroux

Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.

- Paul Theroux

I was kind of raised with the suggestion that I had a duty to do; that life was real, life was earnest. And I hated that, actually. I needed to be liberated, to be told that I could live the life that I wanted to live; that I didn't need a job, or to be shouted at; that I could be myself; that I could be happy.

- Paul Theroux

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.

- Paul Theroux

My father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn't know what he did. But my kids were privy to the ups and downs of a writer's life.

- Paul Theroux

To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration.

- Paul Theroux

I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble.

- Paul Theroux

When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen.

- Paul Theroux

The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place.

- Paul Theroux

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.

- Paul Theroux

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

- Paul Theroux

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.

- Paul Theroux

You may not know it but I'm no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in.

- Paul Theroux

Africa is really a place for the wealthy traveler. It's got some nice hotels, but they're very expensive hotels. It doesn't really cater to the backpacker or to the overland traveler.

- Paul Theroux

I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.

- Paul Theroux

There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.

- Paul Theroux

I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties.

- Paul Theroux

What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one's whole life.

- Paul Theroux

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

- Paul Theroux

One of the things the 'Tao of Travel' shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them.

- Paul Theroux

I think I understand passion. Love is something else.

- Paul Theroux

Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.

- Paul Theroux

My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.

- Paul Theroux

I should start by saying that traveling in the States is a bit like traveling in Asia. You need it, it helps to have an introduction - that there is a certain network.

- Paul Theroux

People say writing is really hard. That's very unfair to those who are doing real jobs. People who work in the fields or fix roofs, engineers, or car mechanics. I think lying on your back working under an oily car, that's a job.

- Paul Theroux

Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.

- Paul Theroux

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

- Paul Theroux

I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about.

- Paul Theroux

Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine.

- Paul Theroux

The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business, but it's the only thing they've been allowed to do.

- Paul Theroux

I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone babbling.

- Paul Theroux

When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.

- Paul Theroux

I don't look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren't there, there would be no economy. So I understand why a tourist economy is necessary.

- 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.

- Paul Theroux

Nyasaland was the perfect country for a volunteer. It was friendly and destitute; it was small and out-of-the-way. It had all of Africa's problems - poverty, ignorance, disease.

- Paul Theroux

People who don't read books a lot are threatened by books.

- Paul Theroux

People see a hungry face, and they want to feed it; that's a natural response.

- Paul Theroux

You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.

- Paul Theroux

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

- Paul Theroux

There are two places that are hard to write about. A place like Britain, England in particular, which has been written about by everybody, and then the place that's never been written about.

- Paul Theroux

A journey awakens all our old fears of danger and risk. Your life is on the line. You are living by your own resources; you have to find your own way and solve every problem on the road.

- Paul Theroux

I've never spent a whole year in one place without leaving.

- Paul Theroux

When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost.

- Paul Theroux

A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about having a very bad time; having a miserable time, even better.

- Paul Theroux

Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.

- Paul Theroux

I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.

- Paul Theroux

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

- Paul Theroux

People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.

- Paul Theroux

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.

- Paul Theroux

The people I've known who've done great things of that type - you know, building hospitals, running schools - are very humble people. They give their lives to the project.

- Paul Theroux

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

- Paul Theroux

When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.

- Paul Theroux

I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't want people to ask me questions about it.

- Paul Theroux

I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.

- Paul Theroux

I am happy being what I am.

- Paul Theroux

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think.

- Paul Theroux

The Trans-Siberian Express is like a cruise across an oceanic landscape. I've done it three times.

- Paul Theroux

There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go.

- Paul Theroux

You need to be on your own so that you can meet people as you are, and as they are.

- Paul Theroux

You can't separate the people from the places - although I sometimes like traveling in places where there are no people.

- Paul Theroux

One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.

- Paul Theroux

The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.

- Paul Theroux

My greatest inspiration is memory.

- Paul Theroux

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.

- Paul Theroux

The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.

- Paul Theroux

When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home.

- Paul Theroux

It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.

- Paul Theroux

The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.

- Paul Theroux

You leave the States, and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you.

- Paul Theroux