Paul Theroux
Paul Theroux
Paul Edward Therouxis an American travel writer and novelist, whose best-known work is The Great Railway Bazaar. He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were adapted as feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast, which was adapted for the 1986 movie of the same name...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 April 1941
CountryUnited States of America
can-do ifs
What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry.
travel kindness hands
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.
life-lesson book good-luck
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.
travel retrospect glamorous
Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
travel hassle overwhelming
The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.
gains reputation modest
Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.
goes-on tourists safari
Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't.
travel blessing may
The traveler's boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience - shocking though it may seem at the time - is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.
travel landscape worst
Truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes.
limits social persons
A foreign swear-word is practically inoffensive except to the person who has learnt it early in life and knows its social limits.
guests want invisible
I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
travel feelings mind
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
travel book writing
A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.
travel book stories
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.