black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.

Paul Theroux

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.
PAUL THEROUX

Book Novelist Travel
…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
PAUL THEROUX

Artist Country might People Society
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
PAUL THEROUX

Help Helping Mutual Weakness
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

Home People Thinking
The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate’s career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.
PAUL THEROUX

Career Country White
Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
PAUL THEROUX

Mine Travel Trip
It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
PAUL THEROUX

Magical Place Travel Worst
My greatest inspiration is memory.
PAUL THEROUX

Country Inspiration Memories People
I don’t think that it’s possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it’s simple.
PAUL THEROUX

Experiences Reward Simple Thinking
Sometimes people read a book in order to not go on a trip. You read a book instead of going on the trip. And so the travel writer is doing the traveling for you.
PAUL THEROUX

Book Order People
It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.
PAUL THEROUX

Boredom Hero Novelists
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.
PAUL THEROUX

Alive Grateful Squinting
I don’t look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren’t there, there would be no economy. So I understand why a tourist economy is necessary.
PAUL THEROUX

Hawaii Look Years
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.
PAUL THEROUX

Boston Childhood Maine
You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.
PAUL THEROUX

Earth Secret Thinking
Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
PAUL THEROUX

Chance Fiction Giving Second

You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Paul Theroux Quotes