Quotes from Paul Theroux

It seems to me that there is always something luminous in the face of a person in the act of reading.

Death rephrases the life of everyone who's near.

I cannot think of any writer of stature in English who has not shown a knowledge of the Bible.

Nature is crooked. I wanted right angles and straight lines. Ice! Oh, why do they all drip? You cut yourself opening a can of tuna fish and you die. One puncture in your foot and your life leaks out through your toe. What are they for, moose antlers? Get down on all fours and live. You're protected on your hands and knees. It's either that or wings.

January snow lay thick on the ground—crusty, pitted, and hardened, some of it like the bubbly honeycomb of air-dried sea foam in the tide wrack down at the beach, the sort of snow that stays so long you get used to the intrusion of that world of uninvited white, a hooded subverted landscape, sparkling in the low flame of a sallow sunrise on a winter morning.

Time is a factor in travel, one of the most crucial.

Suffering has no value, but you have to suffer in order to know that. I never found it easy to travel, yet the difficulty in it made it satisfying because it seemed in that way to resemble the act of writing - groping around in the dark, wandering into the unknown, coming to understand the condition of strangeness.

I said I didn't think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes - better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry predatory poor. All the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to assure their continued prosperity.

To travel unconnected, away from anyone's gaze or reach, is a bliss.

Last days? Don't they know? These are the traits of all days, every day, everywhere.

MOST TRAVEL, AND CERTAINLY the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life. This risky suspension of disbelief is often an experience freighted with anxiety. But what's the alternative? Usually there is none.

A British traveler remarked, 'There are [fashions in Guatemala] which it would require more than common charity to speak of with respect...' FILL IN YOUR OWN GRIPES! ;-)

just a short trip to any French territory in the Pacific is enough to convince even the most casual observer that the French are among the most self-serving, manipulative, trivial-minded, obnoxious, cynical, and corrupting nations on the face of the earth.

city of twenty-three million. Half of this huge number of chilangos—as the Mexico City dwellers call themselves—are classified as enduring dire poverty, many enjoying extreme wealth, and an estimated fifteen thousand children live on the street.

That seemed to be a feature of life in the country [Malawi]: to welcome strangers, to let them live out their fantasy of philanthropy - a school, an orphanage, a clinic, a welfare center, a malaria eradication program, or a church; and then determine if in any of this effort and expense there was a side benefit - a kickback, a bribe, an easy job, a free vehicle. If the scheme didn't work - and few of them did work - whose fault was that? Whose idea was it in the first place?

It seemed that his anger was partly theatrical, that he was amping up his shouts to intimidate me.

Why do things get weaker and worse? Why don't they get better? Because we accept that they fall apart! But they don't have to --- they could last forever. Why do things get more expensive? Any fool can see that they should get cheaper as technology gets more efficient. It's despair to accept the senility of obsolescence...

The saddest task for the ironist is having to tell the listener that it's a joke, because of course it is never a joke.

it was just a version of Rimbaud in Harar: the exile, a selfish beast with modest fantasies of power, secretly enjoying a life of beer drinking and scribbling and occasional mythomania in a nice climate where there were no interruptions, such as unwelcome letters or faxes or cell phones. It was an eccentric ideal, life lived off the map.¨

Before I left the house I put my head into the boys' bedroom. The room was cool but the children seemed to radiate warmth - their glow was in the air - and this warmth from such a small bed I associated with their good hearts. They still smelled soapily of their baths, and I kissed their warm cheeks and whispered good night. What is it in darkness that makes us whisper?

A viagem é muito mais recompensadora quando deixa de ter que ver com a nossa chegada a um destino e se torna indistinguível de vivermos a nossa vida.

An aimless joy is a pure joy," I said, quoting Yeats.

Not much because all aid is political. When this country (Malawi) became independent it had very few institutions. It still doesn't have many. The donors aren't contributing to development. They maintain the status quo. Politicians love that, because they hate change. The tyrants love aid. Aid helps them stay in power and contributes to underdevelopment. It's not social or cultural and it certainly isn't economic. Aid is one of the main reasons for underdevelopment in Africa.

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us. -Paul Theroux, novelist (b. 1941)