Top 55 Paul Theroux Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.

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

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

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.