Paul Theroux Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Paul Theroux:

When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.

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.

Paul Theroux

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

There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.

Paul Theroux

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

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.

Paul Theroux

Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.

Paul Theroux

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.

Paul Theroux

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.

Paul Theroux

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

Paul Theroux

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.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

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.

Paul Theroux

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

Paul Theroux

People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.

Paul Theroux

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.

Paul Theroux

People see a hungry face, and they want to feed it; that's a natural response.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Paul Theroux

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

My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.

Paul Theroux

When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.

Paul Theroux

The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something - a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unusual is a very sustaining thing in travel.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

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.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

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

Paul Theroux

You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.

Paul Theroux

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

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

Paul Theroux

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.

Paul Theroux