Quotes from Paul Theroux

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.

People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.

Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.

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.

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.

A place that doesn't welcome tourists, that's really difficult and off the map, is a place I want to see.

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

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.

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.

What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry.

Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.

One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.

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.

You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.

Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.

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.

Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.

Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.

It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.

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.

An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.