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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Japanese
Sarcastic
Rude
Manners
Made
Good
Indistinguishable
Rudeness
Perfected

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.
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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
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In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937 Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan.
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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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The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
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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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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
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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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I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.
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The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.
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I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.
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Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
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No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.
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Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.
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