Quotes from Paul Theroux

The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar.

These chicken feet are first quality. You appreciate them?

The travel, the sex, the writing, the romances, were—so Norman Sherry suggests—all attempts by Greene to relieve his depression. He was an authentic melancholic.

It always amazed me to see American factories in Mexico, so near the border

peaceful and salubrious El Paso

there is a substratum of criminality even in Mexico's prosperous places, especially in the prosperous places, and it takes unexpected forms.

I often had the feeling that it was the old immemorial Confucian family that had kept China orderly. Mao had attacked the family-the Cultural Revolution was intentionally an assault on the family system, when children were told to rat on their bourgeois parents. But that had faltered and failed. The family had endured

All that light, instead of giving an impression of warmth and activity, merely exposed its emptiness in a deadening blaze.

The dubious achievement in travel these days is enduring the persistent nuisance of a succession of airports in order to arrive at a distant place for a brief interlude of the exotic, maintaining the delusion that it is travel. This is the equivalent of being measured like a projectile and being shot out of a cannon, and that's how most of us feel in such a state, like a human cannonball, dazed and confused, in the company of other cannonballs.

because for me, Harry Potter is a Taco Bell 7-Layer Burrito.

The murderous, self-elected, megalomaniacal head of state with the morals of a fruit fly is an obscene feature of African life that is not likely to disappear.

Bunt was disgustedly drinking a pint of beer, eyeing the table with resentment, the dishes of sticky pork and soggy and wilted lettuce, the black vegetables, the gray broth, the purple meat. On one dish of yellow meat was a severed chicken's head, its eyes blinded, its scalloped comb torn like a red rag.

The next time you clap on your expensive Bose headphones or fire up your car stereo, you had to consider that they were put together a hundred yards from Arizona by someone living in a hut in the Sonoran Desert

All the crockery in China had been smashed – flung over the years in all the periodic convulsions for which China was famous. All the blood-stained carpets had been tossed away. All the ancestors' portraits had been destroyed. All the bodies had been buried. It was a country of bare rooms and empty shelves, like this apartment

Masked policemen and masked soldiers manned checkpoints on the main road

Disappeared. Obviously killed. International experts came and unearthed most of the story.

When something bad is done to me, I pretend that it happened a long time ago, to someone else.

This mention of Juan Villoro was fortuitous. He is one of Mexico's most illustrious writers, a

Why see death as a hangman when it is truer to see it as a harvester leveling the earth with its scythe? Oddly, we take hope from the seasons — the rebirth of spring after the death of winter — or from the rising and setting of the sun. But no spring, no dawn beyond death, has ever been proven. 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.

I don't want to go to the United States," Mario, another of the old men, said, and he pointed—four blocks north was the fence. "My family is here. I was born here. This is my home.

I was now deeper into Mexico than I had driven so far.

His employees must show some respect, even if"—he smiled—"even if they do not feel it in their hearts.

My head was buzzing with anxiety—it was all those warnings—but relief came in the form of butterflies of the sort I'd seen on the riverbank at El Cenizo.

I speak my language fluently, but my children aren't interested," she said