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. – Paul Theroux
My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones. – 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. – Paul Theroux
A journey awakens all our old fears of danger and risk. Your life is on the line. You are living by your own resources; you have to find your own way and solve every problem on the road. – Paul Theroux
I don’t look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren’t there, there would be no economy. So I understand why a tourist economy is necessary. – Paul Theroux
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. – Paul Theroux
I think I am typical in believing that the Peace Corps trained us brilliantly and then did little more except send us into the bush. It was not a bad way of running things. – Paul Theroux
I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone babbling. – 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. – Paul Theroux
Because of my capacity for listening to strangers’ tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tedium, and this is why I choose to travel alone. – Paul Theroux
There’s books that are about places we will never go, and then there’s books that inspire us to go. – Paul Theroux
I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees. – Paul Theroux
The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That’s happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn’t like it. – Paul Theroux
Nyasaland was the perfect country for a volunteer. It was friendly and destitute; it was small and out-of-the-way. It had all of Africa’s problems – poverty, ignorance, disease. – Paul Theroux
My record was so bad that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troublemaker and was accepted as a volunteer only after a great deal of explaining and arguing. – 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. – Paul Theroux
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation. – Paul Theroux
It’s only when you’re alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources. – Paul Theroux
I’m constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read. – 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. – Paul Theroux
Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene – they influenced my life to a profound extent. – 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. – Paul Theroux
People say writing is really hard. That’s very unfair to those who are doing real jobs. People who work in the fields or fix roofs, engineers, or car mechanics. I think lying on your back working under an oily car, that’s a job. – Paul Theroux
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. – Paul Theroux
A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them – jobs, money, pride. – Paul Theroux
