Paul Theroux, 1941 -

Novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). After college he decided to join the Peace Corps in 1963. He later said, "I had thought of responsibilities I did not want—marriage seemed too permanent, grad school too hard, and the army too brutal." He said the Peace Corps was a kind of "Howard Johnson's on the main drag to maturity."

The Peace Corps sent him to live in East Africa. He was expelled from Malawi after he became friends with a group that planned to assassinate the president of the country. He continued traveling around Africa, teaching English, and started submitting pieces to magazines back in the United States. While living in Africa, he became friends with the writer V.S. Naipaul, who became his mentor and who encouraged him to keep traveling.

He had published several novels when he decided to go on a four-month trip through Asia by train. He wrote every day on the journey, and he filled four thick notebooks with material that eventually became his first best-seller, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975).

*Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

*Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

*Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

*The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume

*It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

*Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation; and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

*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.

*The train passed fruit farms and clean villages and Swiss cycling in kerchiefs, calendar scenes that you admire for a moment before feeling an urge to move on to a new month.

*I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.

*It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.

*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.

*The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate's career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.

*Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

*Riding the Iron Rooster.

*The kind of travel I do is a reaction to that. Instead of going to meet gorillas or Bhutan, I prefer to go [my own way] and do things the wealthy wouldn't dare to do.

*Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence.

*The drug tour he had hoped would be unique, his own, ... was apparently a widely known trip down a well-traveled path, in the sort of full-color brochure that also described gorilla encounters in Africa and white-water rafting on the Ganges and treks to the Everest base camp and birding in Mongolia.

*There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.

*The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

*As Calcutta smells of death and Bombay of Money, Bangkok smells of sex, but this sexual aroma is mingled with the sharper whiffs of sex and money.