Paul Theroux

There are places that I've always wanted to go. First I went to Africa, and when I was there I realized there were places in Africa I really to wanted to visit: The Congo, West Africa, Mombassa. I wanted to see the deep, dark, outlandish places.

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.

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

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.

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 problems - poverty, ignorance, disease.

To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration.

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.

You can't separate the people from the places - although I sometimes like traveling in places where there are no people.

Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.

Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.

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.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

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.

Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.

Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.

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.

I think I understand passion. Love is something else.

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.

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.

I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.

The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.

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.

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.

I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.

When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.

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.

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.

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.

Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.

There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.

A place that doesn't welcome tourists, that's really difficult and off the map, is a place I want to see.

The grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.

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.

One of the things the 'Tao of Travel' shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them.

Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.

What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one's whole life.

Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.

It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.

Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.

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.

The Trans-Siberian Express is like a cruise across an oceanic landscape. I've done it three times.

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.

My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.

The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business but its the only thing theyve been allowed to do.

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation experimentation and substitution dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.

I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.

Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, 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.

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.

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.

My greatest inspiration is memory.

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.

I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone babbling.

Hawaii is not a state of mind but a state of grace.

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

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.

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation experimentation and substitution dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way

A gun show is about like minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them jobs money pride.

I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about.

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

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 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.

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.

Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.

My earliest thought, long before I was in high school, was just to go away, get out of my house, get out of my city. I went to Medford High School, but even in grade school and junior high, I fantasized about leaving.

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.

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.

Even the most distant and exotic place has its parallel in ordinary life.

I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties.

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.

Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.

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.

My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.

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.

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.

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.

What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself.

I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.

An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.

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.

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It's a passion. And I can't understand people who don't want to travel.

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.

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.

I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.

I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.

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.

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.

I am happy being what I am.

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.'

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.

My record was so bad that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troublemaker and was accepted as a volunteer only after a great deal of explaining and arguing.

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.

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

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.