American - Novelist | April 10, 1941 -
I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
Paul Theroux
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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.
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It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.
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The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.
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A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
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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.
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The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business, but it's the only thing they've been allowed to do.
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I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster.
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When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home.
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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.
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Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.
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Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall.
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