Quotes from Paul Theroux

But curious to see the fence, I drove to the Rio Grande Valley, south to Harlingen, over to McAllen, and down Twenty-Third Street to International Boulevard and the frontier at Hidalgo, where the thing was obvious, ugly, and unambiguous.

In an uncommon move, a young US Border Patrol officer in El Paso, Francisco Cantú, disenchanted with his job, quit to become an activist on border abuses.

his arms hanging loose

an ugly steel fence you might associate with a prison perimeter, twenty-five feet high, like nothing I had seen in any other country.

Believe me, England's prisons are full of splendid people.

like a medieval wall, it was merely a symbol of exclusion rather than anything practical, and easily climbed over or tunneled under.

But it got worse and worse." He sighed. "Politics!" "Ours or yours?" "Both! Our government is bad, yours—well, you know the talk. 'Mexicans are criminals and rapists.' And really, I was working hard, and all the Mexicans I knew were good workers.

People always tell you that night school is a good thing,' I said. 'But they are the same people who go home after a day's work and eat and snooze and listen to the radio. You students are doing one of the hardest things in the world- studying at night, when you're tired ...

Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.

Truth is not a saga of alarming episodes; it is a detail, usually a small one, that gives a fiction life.

In an age of aerial surveillance and high-security technology, it was a blacksmith's barrier of antiquated ironmongery: old rusty ramparts running for miles, a visible example of national paranoia.

Any advice for me? I'm driving south." "Don't drive at night. You'll be fine. You'll learn a lot. And Mexico City is a lot safer than it used to be.

Whenever an art form—music, book, drama, song—is dragged into the seminar rooms, it is finished as a force. Nothing is more deadly than the anatomizing of scholarship, since the study of art, any art—even the obscene, semiliterate yawp and grunt of rap—drains the life from it.

I argued myself into thinking that physical experience is the only reality. I didn't want to be told about this at second hand. I didn't want to look at picture or study it on a small computer screen. I didn't want to be lectured about it. I wanted to be traveling in the middle of it, and for it to be washing over me, as it was today.

Here's the secret," he said. "I don't want more than I have—therefore I have everything. It's the economy of enough.

I asked them to amplify a bit.

A woman in the English Department at Fudan University walked with a cane as a result of criticism by Red Guards-she was kicked and beaten for advocating the reading of the Bourgeois feudalist William Shakespeare. But times had changed. This same woman had just been a faculty adviser on a student production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Shanghai Shakespeare Festival in the spring of 1986.

Listen, stranger; this was myself: this was I.

and the mocking realization that money was just colorful crumpled paper, hardly different from a candy wrapper, the market itself little more than a casino.

Perhaps it was working; side by side, Douglas (a town that had lost its industries) and Agua Prieta (a town that had gained many factories) stood out as the safest and most serene towns I saw in the whole of my traverse of the border.

Fascinated to know more, I joined them at breakfast

Reading about a far-off place can be a satisfaction in itself, and you might be thankful you're reading about the bad trip without the dust in your nose and the sun burning your head, not having to endure the unrewarding nuisance and delay of the road. But reading can also be a powerful stimulus to travel.

But, truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes.

Chinese blaming is always reserved for the higher-ups: underlings are always innocent. That was how they had been able to cope with the monstrous guilt in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution.