Paul Theroux

“The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.”

“I am happy being what I am.”

“I feel as if my mission is to write, to see, to observe, and I feel lazy if I'm not reaching conclusions. I feel stupid. I feel as if I'm wasting my time.”

“The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.”

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

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

“Love doesn't last.”

“The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it.”

“Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it.”

“Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists. The tourists at Etosha conjure up a fantastic Africa after their nightly dinner by walking to the fence at the hotel-managed waterhole to stare at the rhinos and lions and eland coming to drink: a glimpse of wild nature with overhead floodlights. They have been bused to the hotel to see it, and it is very beautiful, but it is no effort....My only boast in travel is my effort...”

“I said I didn't think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes - better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry predatory poor. All the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to assure their continued prosperity.”

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

“Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.”

“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”

“It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.”

“My greatest inspiration is memory.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”