Quotes About Paul Theroux

There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.

Paul Theroux was sitting in the pew (at Bruce Chatwin's memorial service) behind him. "I suppose we'll be here for you next week, Salman," he said.

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.

Through his long, productive career, Paul Theroux has mixed nonfiction books about exotic travel with novels set in exotic places. Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras - he lives in and writes about places most of us never see.

Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, it needs an angle, it needs a 'sound bite.

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

Borges, who said, "Defeat has a dignity which noisy victory does not deserve.

What about writers—are they protesting?" "Yes, many," María said. "Juan Villoro?" "Villoro has written a great deal, and he is a friend to our movement.

Don't write," he said, seeing me scribbling into my notebook, taking me for a journalist.

if I promised to put my notebook on the floor and my pen in my pocket. And he suggested that I sit back and not gape out the window.

I mentioned that I had just come from a tour in Boys' Town. "That's very risky," Jaime Arispe said. "You have no rights there, because it's a Zona de Tolerancia. They have their own police.

Instead of accepting that, I am writing this. I realize that what motivates most other writers in the world is the desire to have control over their obituary.

The Peace Corps was innocent and inefficient

The Peace Corps was innocent and inefficient, and we weren't under any pressure to join.

His Congo Diary is a powerful account of an idealistic man's campaign to bring change to Africa

The insecurity in Juárez drifted through the air like the memory of a shattering dream.

a powerful account of an idealistic man's campaign to bring change to Africa, at a time when I was a schoolteacher in the African bush.

Business is bad, but at least it's quiet here," Ignacio, a shoeshine man, said to me in the plaza at Reynosa, brushing goop on my shoes.

which proved yet again, as I had seen in many lands, that the Bible was often the happy hunting ground of an unbalanced mind.

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.

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

The sight of bribery on the back road of any country is a clear indication that the whole place is corrupt and the regime a thieving tyranny

Finally, this being America," Bryson says at another point, "there is the constant possibility of murder." The bears leave him alone, he is not murdered, and apart from sore feet, he is hardly inconvenienced in what is, for all its mock ordeals, a likable book.

His book accurately reflects what I feel in traveling in America—the solitary road trip that is in many respects a Zen experience, scattered with road candy, unavailable to motorists in any other country on earth.