Quotes from Paul Theroux

Texas congressman had called it "an inefficient fourteenth-century solution to a twenty-first-century problem," which was accurate because, like a medieval wall, it was merely a symbol of exclusion rather than anything practical, and easily climbed over or tunneled under.

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled;

I decided to drive straight to Tijuana to make a slow, uninterrupted traverse of the entire frontera, a road trip from west to east, San Ysidro, California, to Brownsville, Texas, which was also Tijuana to Matamoros, zigzagging from the United States to Mexico and back, from one border town to the other.

Write the story of a contemporary cured of his heartbreaks solely by long contemplation of a landscape

It was always like a fire drill, getting on or off a Chinese train, with people panting and pushing

Being a man is bad enough; being manly is appalling.

Fiction give life to places in expressive ways that no history book can begin to suggest.

A further detail: this gringo writer was self-supporting and had no connection to the American embassy or any foreign organization.

Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine.

The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the whole point of work, of life, of love.

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.

Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.

I've never spent a whole year in one place without leaving.

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

I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't want people to ask me questions about it.

For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.

As Calcutta smells of death and Bombay of Money, Bangkok smells of sex, but this sexual aroma is mingled with the sharper whiffs of sex and money

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

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

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

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.

When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.