Paul Theroux Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Paul Theroux Quotes. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Paul Theroux Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.

1
Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illum

Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.
Paul Theroux
2
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.
Paul Theroux
3
A journey awakens all our old fears of danger and risk. Your life is on the line. You are living by your own resources; you have to find your own way and solve every problem on the road.
Paul Theroux
4
Love doesn’t last.
Paul Theroux
5
I wanted the Peace Corps to be something very vague and unorganized, and to a large extent it was. It did not run smoothly. The consequence was that we were left alone.
Paul Theroux
6
Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.
Paul Theroux
7
To me, writing is a considered act. It’s something which is a great labor of thought and consideration.
Paul Theroux
8
The idea of traveling in Africa for me is based on going by road or train or bus or whatever and crossing borders. You can’t travel easily or at all through some countries.
Paul Theroux
9
Paul Theroux
10
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.
Paul Theroux
11
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
Paul Theroux
12
People say writing is really hard. That’s very unfair to those who are doing real jobs. People who work in the fields or fix roofs, engineers, or car mechanics. I think lying on your back working under an oily car, that’s a job.
Paul Theroux
13
I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don’t want to relax. I want to see something.
Paul Theroux
14
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.
Paul Theroux
15
I should start by saying that traveling in the States is a bit like traveling in Asia. You need it, it helps to have an introduction – that there is a certain network.
Paul Theroux
16
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.
Paul Theroux
17
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.
Paul Theroux
18
Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine.
Paul Theroux
19
One of my fears is not writing. I don’t know how to do anything else.
Paul Theroux
20
Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.
Paul Theroux
21
Because of my capacity for listening to strangerstales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tedium, and this is why I choose to travel alone.
Paul Theroux
22
You define a good flight by negatives: you didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.
Paul Theroux
23
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.
Paul Theroux
24
You can’t write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.
Paul Theroux
25
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.
Paul Theroux
26
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 problemspoverty, ignorance, disease.
Paul Theroux
27
Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.
Paul Theroux
28
A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them – jobs, money, pride.
Paul Theroux
29
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.
Paul Theroux
30
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.
Paul Theroux
31
Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
Paul Theroux
32
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.
Paul Theroux
33
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.
Paul Theroux
34
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.
Paul Theroux
35
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.
Paul Theroux
36
People who don’t read books a lot are threatened by books.
Paul Theroux
37
Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.
Paul Theroux
38
Travel works best when you’re forced to come to terms with the place you’re in.
Paul Theroux
39
You leave the States, and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you.
Paul Theroux
40
The more you write, the more you’re capable of writing.
Paul Theroux
41
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.
Paul Theroux
42
Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
Paul Theroux
43
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.
Paul Theroux
44
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.
Paul Theroux
45
I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone babbling.
Paul Theroux
46
I think there is only one way to write fiction – alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.
Paul Theroux
47
I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.
Paul Theroux
48
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.
Paul Theroux
49
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.’
Paul Theroux
50
I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
Paul Theroux
51
It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
Paul Theroux
52
The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson‘s on the main drag into maturity.
Paul Theroux
53
Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene – they influenced my life to a profound extent.
Paul Theroux
54
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.
Paul Theroux
55
If you’re a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don’t like other people. I’m not like that, I don’t think.
Paul Theroux
56
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.
Paul Theroux
57
People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.
Paul Theroux
58
The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It’s a passion. And I can’t understand people who don’t want to travel.
Paul Theroux
59
I do not want to be young again.
Paul Theroux
60
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.
Paul Theroux
61
The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something – a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unusual is a very sustaining thing in travel.
Paul Theroux
62
When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.
Paul Theroux
63
A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
Paul Theroux
64
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.
Paul Theroux
65
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.
Paul Theroux
66
The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.
Paul Theroux