Quote

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

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
Way
Alterations
Pleasures
Pages
Seeing
Pleasure
Reading
Book
Made
Alteration

More quotes by Paul Theroux

Image
You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
Paul Theroux
Image
Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I've ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare.
Paul Theroux
Image
One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
Paul Theroux
Image
I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don't want to relax. I want to see something.
Paul Theroux
Image
Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
Paul Theroux
Image
Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
Paul Theroux
Image
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
Paul Theroux
Image
A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
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
When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.
Paul Theroux
Image
The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again.
Paul Theroux
Image
To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it's a paradox of this sort of parallel life. A safari is an expensive experience and it's adjacent to a place where people are having a very tough time.
Paul Theroux
Image
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.
Paul Theroux
Image
Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
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
Tibet has a very proud people but it's culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It's like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it's gone.
Paul Theroux
Image
My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.
Paul Theroux
Image
He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.
Paul Theroux
Image
Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
Paul Theroux
Image
...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
Paul Theroux