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" My record was so bad that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troublemaker and was accepted as a volunteer only after a great deal of explaining and arguing. "

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

Paul Theroux

Solitude

Phone

Lonely

" I do not want to be young again. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler. "

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

" 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

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

" Africa is really a place for the wealthy traveler. It's got some nice hotels, but they're very expensive hotels. It doesn't really cater to the backpacker or to the overland traveler. "

" Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world. "

Paul Theroux

Book

Serious

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" The Trans-Siberian Express is like a cruise across an oceanic landscape. I've done it three times. "

Paul Theroux

Done

Landscape

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

" Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed. "

Paul Theroux

Been

Geography

" 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. "

" 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. "