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" 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. "

Paul Theroux

Problems

Poverty

Small

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" Travel is glamorous only in retrospect. "

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

" 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. "

" Love doesn't last. "

Paul Theroux

Love

Last

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

" You can't separate the people from the places - although I sometimes like traveling in places where there are no people. "

Paul Theroux

People

Places

" I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place. "

" Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation. "

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

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

" 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

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves. "

" Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace. "