American - Novelist | April 10, 1941 -
Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.
Paul Theroux
CultureMeWorldBookIndiaSerious
Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.
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I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.
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A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.
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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.
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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.
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One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.
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If you look at a map, you see that Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. It's 17 hours of straight flying from London. It's very far away, and sometimes you feel as if you're on another planet. But I like that. Also, that's ideal for writing.
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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.
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My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.
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An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.
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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.
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