Quote

Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Failure
Unprecedented
Success
Orders
Shortages
Order
Produced
Seams
Wells
Enterprise
Enterprises
Well
Indian
Disruption
Work
Disaster
Disasters
Made
Seemed
Shortage
Finally
Burst

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I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.
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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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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
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The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
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I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
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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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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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Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.
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Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
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Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
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Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.
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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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The traveler's boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience - shocking though it may seem at the time - is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.
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I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.
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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.
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You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.
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