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" I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write. "

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" I think I am typical in believing that the Peace Corps trained us brilliantly and then did little more except send us into the bush. It was not a bad way of running things. "

Paul Theroux

Believing

Bad

I Am

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

" Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. "

" I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read. "

" Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us. "

" The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume. "

" 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. "

" There are two worlds: the world of the tourist and the world of everyone else. Often they're side by side. But the tourist doesn't actually see how people live. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. "

" Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I was kind of raised with the suggestion that I had a duty to do; that life was real, life was earnest. And I hated that, actually. I needed to be liberated, to be told that I could live the life that I wanted to live; that I didn't need a job, or to be shouted at; that I could be myself; that I could be happy. "

" 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. "

" The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth. "

Paul Theroux

Travel

Notes

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

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

" I am happy being what I am. "

Paul Theroux

I Am Happy

Being

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled. "

" Travel magazines are just one cupcake after another. They're not about travel. The travel magazine is, in fact, about the opposite of travel. It's about having a nice time on a honeymoon, or whatever. "

" Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with. "