Quotes By Paul Theroux

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

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

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

My greatest inspiration is memory.

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

You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.

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.

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

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.

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

The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

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

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.

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.

I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster.

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

Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.

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

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.

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.

I think I understand passion. Love is something else.

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.

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

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.

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.

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