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" I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose. "

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" A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride. "

Paul Theroux

People

Feel

Money

" I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about. "

" 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. "

" I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader. "

" One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else. "

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

" 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

" I don't look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren't there, there would be no economy. So I understand why a tourist economy is necessary. "

" Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves. "

" You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. "

" 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. "

" A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" A journey awakens all our old fears of danger and risk. Your life is on the line. You are living by your own resources; you have to find your own way and solve every problem on the road. "

" People say writing is really hard. That's very unfair to those who are doing real jobs. People who work in the fields or fix roofs, engineers, or car mechanics. I think lying on your back working under an oily car, that's a job. "

" The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that equals the Yangtze River, that equals the Nile. We have the greatest cities in the world - among the greatest cities in the world. "

" I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better. "

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

Paul Theroux

Look

Someone

" Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing. "

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

" People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it. "

" I think I understand passion. Love is something else. "

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

" You need to be on your own so that you can meet people as you are, and as they are. "

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

" 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. "

" Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something. "