Travel Quotes
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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.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
People see a hungry face, and they want to feed it; that's a natural response.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
There are two worlds: the world of the tourist and the world of everyone else. Often they're side by side. But the tourist doesn't actually see how people live.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that equals the Yangtze River, that equals the Nile. We have the greatest cities in the world - among the greatest cities in the world.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
There are places that I've always wanted to go. First I went to Africa, and when I was there I realized there were places in Africa I really to wanted to visit: The Congo, West Africa, Mombassa. I wanted to see the deep, dark, outlandish places.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
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.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
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.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, it needs an angle, it needs a 'sound bite.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
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.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
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.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone babbling.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
Africa is really a place for the wealthy traveler. It's got some nice hotels, but they're very expensive hotels. It doesn't really cater to the backpacker or to the overland traveler.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
I was kind of raised with the suggestion that I had a duty to do; that life was real, life was earnest. And I hated that, actually. I needed to be liberated, to be told that I could live the life that I wanted to live; that I didn't need a job, or to be shouted at; that I could be myself; that I could be happy.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
My father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn't know what he did. But my kids were privy to the ups and downs of a writer's life.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Paul Theroux
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
Quote by -Paul Theroux