The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.
— Paul Theroux
I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.
Nyasaland was the perfect country for a volunteer. It was friendly and destitute; it was small and out-of-the-way. It had all of Africa's problems - poverty, ignorance, disease.
An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.
If you look at a map, you see that Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. It's 17 hours of straight flying from London. It's very far away, and sometimes you feel as if you're on another planet. But I like that. Also, that's ideal for writing.
There are two places that are hard to write about. A place like Britain, England in particular, which has been written about by everybody, and then the place that's never been written about.
I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.
Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial.
Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.
People see a hungry face, and they want to feed it; that's a natural response.
My earliest thought, long before I was in high school, was just to go away, get out of my house, get out of my city. I went to Medford High School, but even in grade school and junior high, I fantasized about leaving.
I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble.
Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.
Africa is really a place for the wealthy traveler. It's got some nice hotels, but they're very expensive hotels. It doesn't really cater to the backpacker or to the overland traveler.
You can't separate the people from the places - although I sometimes like traveling in places where there are no people.
The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place.
The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it.
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.
I think I am typical in believing that the Peace Corps trained us brilliantly and then did little more except send us into the bush. It was not a bad way of running things.
My record was so bad that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troublemaker and was accepted as a volunteer only after a great deal of explaining and arguing.
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.
One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.
I should start by saying that traveling in the States is a bit like traveling in Asia. You need it, it helps to have an introduction - that there is a certain network.
Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.
Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.
I was kind of raised with the suggestion that I had a duty to do; that life was real, life was earnest. And I hated that, actually. I needed to be liberated, to be told that I could live the life that I wanted to live; that I didn't need a job, or to be shouted at; that I could be myself; that I could be happy.
I've never spent a whole year in one place without leaving.
Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine.
The Trans-Siberian Express is like a cruise across an oceanic landscape. I've done it three times.
The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something - a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unusual is a very sustaining thing in travel.
The idea of traveling in Africa for me is based on going by road or train or bus or whatever and crossing borders. You can't travel easily or at all through some countries.
I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist, but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
A journey awakens all our old fears of danger and risk. Your life is on the line. You are living by your own resources; you have to find your own way and solve every problem on the road.
A place that doesn't welcome tourists, that's really difficult and off the map, is a place I want to see.
Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, it needs an angle, it needs a 'sound bite.
I wanted the Peace Corps to be something very vague and unorganized, and to a large extent it was. It did not run smoothly. The consequence was that we were left alone.
Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tedium, and this is why I choose to travel alone.
I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about.
Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.
A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.
Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.
Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
I do not want to be young again.
There are places that I've always wanted to go. First I went to Africa, and when I was there I realized there were places in Africa I really to wanted to visit: The Congo, West Africa, Mombassa. I wanted to see the deep, dark, outlandish places.
You need to be on your own so that you can meet people as you are, and as they are.
Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.
The place that interests me most, actually, is the United States. I've realized that I haven't traveled much in the States. There's a lot to see.
The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It's a passion. And I can't understand people who don't want to travel.
I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.
What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself.
