Quotes By Paul Theroux

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

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

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

I am happy being what I am.

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.

People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.

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.'

When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen.

People who don't read books a lot are threatened by books.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

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

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

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

My greatest inspiration is memory.

When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home.

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