I feel as if my mission is to write, to see, to observe, and I feel lazy if I’m not reaching conclusions. I feel stupid. I feel as if I’m wasting my time. – Paul Theroux
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind. – Paul Theroux
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. – Paul Theroux
I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t want people to ask me questions about it. – Paul Theroux
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. – Paul Theroux
What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one’s whole life. – Paul Theroux
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. – Paul Theroux
An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed. – Paul Theroux
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. – Paul Theroux
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. – Paul Theroux
I should start by saying that traveling in the States is a bit like traveling in Asia. You need it, it helps to have an introduction – that there is a certain network. – Paul Theroux
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. – Paul Theroux
A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it’s usually a book about having a very bad time; having a miserable time, even better. – Paul Theroux
The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It’s a passion. And I can’t understand people who don’t want to travel. – Paul Theroux
The people I’ve known who’ve done great things of that type – you know, building hospitals, running schools – are very humble people. They give their lives to the project. – Paul Theroux
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. – Paul Theroux
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. – Paul Theroux
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. – Paul Theroux
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. – Paul Theroux
Travel magazines are just one cupcake after another. They’re not about travel. The travel magazine is, in fact, about the opposite of travel. It’s about having a nice time on a honeymoon, or whatever. – Paul Theroux
I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties. – Paul Theroux
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. – Paul Theroux
The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire – perhaps a need – to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely. – Paul Theroux
Although I’m not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation. – Paul Theroux
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. – Paul Theroux