Paul Theroux Quotes
-
A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
-
The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the whole point of work, of life, of love.'
-
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
-
I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties.
-
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 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.
-
Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave 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 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.
-
You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.
-
I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.
-
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.
-
The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.
-
An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.
-
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.
-
Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
-
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.
-
One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.
-
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.