Paul Theroux Quotes
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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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Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.
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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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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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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.
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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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The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
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Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
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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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I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble.
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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.
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The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.
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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
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What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one's whole life.
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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.
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I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
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Tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash-suspicious, unbelieving, and incurious.
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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.
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Love doesn't last.