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" I wanted the Peace Corps to be something very vague and unorganized, and to a large extent it was. It did not run smoothly. The consequence was that we were left alone. "

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" What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself. "

Paul Theroux

Yourself

Life

" If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think. "

Paul Theroux

Home

People

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

" The idea of traveling in Africa for me is based on going by road or train or bus or whatever and crossing borders. You can't travel easily or at all through some countries. "

" The place that interests me most, actually, is the United States. I've realized that I haven't traveled much in the States. There's a lot to see. "

Paul Theroux

See

Place

" The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It's a passion. And I can't understand people who don't want to travel. "

" My greatest inspiration is memory. "

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

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Never

Books

" 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

" When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home. "

" I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble. "

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

" I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees. "

" 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. "

" Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation. "

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

Paul Theroux

Travel

Notes

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

" 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. "

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

" I've never spent a whole year in one place without leaving. "

" I am happy being what I am. "

Paul Theroux

I Am Happy

Being

" 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. "

" Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. "

" I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels. "

" 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. "

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

" When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there. "

" 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. "

" If you look at a map, you see that Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. It's 17 hours of straight flying from London. It's very far away, and sometimes you feel as if you're on another planet. But I like that. Also, that's ideal for writing. "

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