Paul Theroux Quotes - Page 5

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way

You can't want to be a writer. You have to be one.

I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.

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. You don't want to read a book about someone having a great time in the South of France, eating and drinking and falling in love. What you want to read is a book about a guy going through the jungle, going through the arctic snow, having a terrible time trying to cross the Sahara, and solving problems as they go.

You can't save the rhinos and you can't preserve a culture. I'm very pessimistic. Once it's gone, it's over.

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.

The biggest surprise was that a country like Angola, that has so much money, that produces so much oil, would be in such a mess and so difficult to travel in. Something is almost cursed in striking oil. It's like the lottery winner who ends up broke.

To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it's a paradox of this sort of parallel life. A safari is an expensive experience and it's adjacent to a place where people are having a very tough time.

Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I've ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare.

All politicians, even the most idealistic ones, are looking for money, sucking up to rich people.

Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.

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.

The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

The long morning shadows lay as still and dark as lakes and patterned the rough ground with straight margins.

Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't.

I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple.

Loneliness in travel directs you and tells you about yourself. You don't become lonely unless you're alone.

Reading is also a journey. It's a process of discovery.

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

I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.

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.

Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.

They say that if the Swiss had designed these mountains they'd be rather flatter.

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.