Quote

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

Paul Theroux

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Writing
Crummy
Nerves
Pretty

More quotes by Paul Theroux

Image
The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
Paul Theroux
Image
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.
Paul Theroux
Image
Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.
Paul Theroux
Image
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.
Paul Theroux
Image
One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
Paul Theroux
Image
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
Paul Theroux
Image
A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
Paul Theroux
Image
I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.
Paul Theroux
Image
There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.
Paul Theroux
Image
Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life
Paul Theroux
Image
When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen.
Paul Theroux
Image
I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple.
Paul Theroux
Image
Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari Africans don't.
Paul Theroux
Image
Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.
Paul Theroux
Image
The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
Paul Theroux
Image
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.
Paul Theroux
Image
Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
Paul Theroux
Image
One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
Paul Theroux
Image
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
Paul Theroux
Image
I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.
Paul Theroux