Quotes By Paul Theroux

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

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I think I understand passion. Love is something else.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.