Quotes from Paul Theroux

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

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

A foreign swear-word is practically inoffensive except to the person who has learnt it early in life and knows its social limits.

A person who is tired of London is not necessarily tired of life; it might be that he just can't find a parking place.

The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.

The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.

People who don't read books a lot are threatened by books.

The Trans-Siberian Express is like a cruise across an oceanic landscape. I've done it three times.

I am happy being what I am.

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.

In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.

You may not know it but I'm no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in.

The people I've known who've done great things of that type - you know, building hospitals, running schools - are very humble people. They give their lives to the project.

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.

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.

I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster.

I'm a tourist, a glorified tourist. I'm not doing it to have a good time or to lie in the sun.

People see a hungry face, and they want to feed it; that's a natural response.

I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone babbling.

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think.

Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial.

All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.