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... →
Paul Theroux
The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to... →
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 father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn't know what he did. But my kids were privy to the ups and downs of a writer's... →
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.
Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and... →
The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the... →
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... →
Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very... →
I like to be lazy. I do like to be busy and really active, but when that's done, you can be sure I will be a lazy boy. I like to take time and... →
Olivier Theyskens