442 Quotes by Paul Theroux

The Peace Corps was innocent and inefficient, and we weren't under any pressure to join.

He used the word savages with affection, as if he liked them a little for it. In his nature was a respect for wildness. He saw it as a personal challenge, something that could be put right with an idea or a machine. He felt he had the answer to most problems, if anyone cared to listen.

I found it depressing that no one in Mongolia should know anything of Chernobyl, especially when they themselves had the same sort of nuclear power plants. It was bad enough that they have been colonized and occupied by the Soviets, but it was much worse that this paternalism was taken so literally that they were treated like children and not told anything.

Bunt was disgustedly drinking a pint of beer, eyeing the table with resentment, the dishes of sticky pork and soggy and wilted lettuce, the black vegetables, the gray broth, the purple meat. On one dish of yellow meat was a severed chicken’s head, its eyes blinded, its scalloped comb torn like a red rag.

I've never spent a whole year in one place without leaving.

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.

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.

Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.

One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.