Paul Theroux Quotes
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Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
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You can't separate the people from the places - although I sometimes like traveling in places where there are no people.
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The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It's a passion. And I can't understand people who don't want to travel.
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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.
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I've never spent a whole year in one place without leaving.
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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.
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Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration.
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A place that doesn't welcome tourists, that's really difficult and off the map, is a place I want to see.
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I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.
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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.
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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.
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I sought trains; I found passengers.
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The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
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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.
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I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble.
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Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.
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Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.
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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.
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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.
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I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.