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" 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. "

Paul Theroux

Desire

Truth

Think

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. "

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

Paul Theroux

Done

Landscape

" Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones. "

" 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. "

" Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind. "

" 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 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. "

" A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about having a very bad time; having a miserable time, even better. "

" 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

" Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" A place that doesn't welcome tourists, that's really difficult and off the map, is a place I want to see. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. 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. "