Quotes By Paul Theroux

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.

I think I understand passion. Love is something else.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

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

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.'

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

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

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 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.

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.

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