Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art. "

Related Quotes:

" I should start by saying that traveling in the States is a bit like traveling in Asia. You need it, it helps to have an introduction - that there is a certain network. "

Paul Theroux

Introduction

Need

Saying

" The more you write, the more you're capable of writing. "

Paul Theroux

Writing

Capable

" Dentists seem to me very orderly, businesslike people who appear to become somewhat bored with the routine of their work after a period of time. Perhaps I'm wrong. "

" What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one's whole life. "

" 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. "

" The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming. "

" You leave the States, and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you. "

" People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction. "

" There are two places that are hard to write about. A place like Britain, England in particular, which has been written about by everybody, and then the place that's never been written about. "

Paul Theroux

Hard

Two

" There are places that I've always wanted to go. First I went to Africa, and when I was there I realized there were places in Africa I really to wanted to visit: The Congo, West Africa, Mombassa. I wanted to see the deep, dark, outlandish places. "

" It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources. "

" 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. "

Paul Theroux

Think

Serious

" I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction. "

" 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. "

" Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions. "

" When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen. "

Paul Theroux

Think

Place

" Nyasaland was the perfect country for a volunteer. It was friendly and destitute; it was small and out-of-the-way. It had all of Africa's problems - poverty, ignorance, disease. "

" Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. "

" 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. "

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

" The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it. "

" There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go. "

Paul Theroux

Never

Books

" My earliest thought, long before I was in high school, was just to go away, get out of my house, get out of my city. I went to Medford High School, but even in grade school and junior high, I fantasized about leaving. "

" The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness. "

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

" Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent. "

" I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely. "

" Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tedium, and this is why I choose to travel alone. "

" I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness. "