Paul Theroux Life Quotations

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.

What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one's whole life.

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

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.

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.

A journey awakens all our old fears of danger and risk. Your life is on the line. You are living by your own resources; you have to find your own way and solve every problem on the road.

I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.

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.

My father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn't know what he did. But my kids were privy to the ups and downs of a writer's life.

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

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 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.

Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life

Travel is about failure or overcoming obstacles, overcoming failures. When a traveler is having lots of good luck, that is not a happy book. That's a book you say, well, I don't need that. I want a life lesson. I want to find out - I want a journey that reflects my life.

Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.

Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.