Paul Theroux

“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.”

“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.”

“The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.”

“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 loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone babbling.”

“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.”

“A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.”

“Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.”

“Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial.”

“When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home.”

“Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.”

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

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