Paul Theroux Art Quotations

... Oceanic malaise. I never saw anyone reading anything more demanding than a comic book. I never heard any youth express an interest in science or art. No one even talked politics. It was all idleness, and whenever I asked someone a question, no matter how simple, no matter how well the person spoke English, there was always a long pause before I got a reply, and I found these Pacific pauses maddening. And there was giggling but no humor - no wit. It was just foolery.

Writers are painful friends, and they are seldom friendly with others. They are insecure in the presence of other writers. Composers of certain kinds of music are the same--tormented and intolerant. Yet some arts not only make the artist social but make him depend upon sociability in order to succeed. Painting is one.

Painters strike me as having warm uncomplicated friendships and probably more natural generosity than the practitioners of any other art. Perhaps this is because painting is such a portable, flexible thing.

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.

I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.

...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.

The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life - the homebound writer's irritants. But also being kept waiting is the human conditon.

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.