Paul Theroux Quotes
-
Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.
-
I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties.
-
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.
-
A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
-
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.
-
An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
-
My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.
-
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.
-
Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.
-
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 like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.
-
One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.
-
The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.
-
You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.
-
In many ways connection has been disastrous. We have confused information (of which there has been too much of) with ideas (of which there are too few. I found out much more about the world and myself by being unconnected.
-
Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
-
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.
-
Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
-
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.
-
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.