Top 248 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Theroux - Page 2

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I do not want to be young again.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

My greatest inspiration is memory.

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