Paul Theroux
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Travel
Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Travel
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.Collection: Friendship
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.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Medical
The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.Collection: Travel
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.'Collection: Hope
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Patience
Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.Collection: Travel
I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.Collection: Alone
I am happy being what I am.
I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.
The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.
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.
The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.
I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.
The Trans-Siberian Express is like a cruise across an oceanic landscape. I've done it three times.
I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone babbling.
Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.
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.
Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.
Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
I've never spent a whole year in one place without leaving.
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.
Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.
A place that doesn't welcome tourists, that's really difficult and off the map, is a place I want to see.
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.
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.
Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.
I think I understand passion. Love is something else.
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.
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.
There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.
It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
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.
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.
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.
The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.
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.
Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
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.