Paul Theroux Quotes

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

I am not a big technology person. I don't go on the Internet really much at all. Drawing is like a zen thing; it's private, which in this day and age is harder to come by.

I don't tweet, Twitter, email, Facebook, look book, no kind of book. I have a land line phone at my home - that's the only phone I have. If my phone rang every day like everyone else around me, I would lose my mind.

For some reason, some of my best solutions and ideas are triggered in those dark theaters, usually totally unrelated to what's going on onscreen. I also enjoy hiking in the foothills and mountains close to Sacramento. I always have to bring a pen and paper to jot down sudden thoughts and ideas. So inspiration arises from countless sources.

We need time to defuse, to contemplate. Just as in sleep our brains relax and give us dreams, so at some time in the day we need to disconnect, reconnect, and look around us.

Short of taking monastic vows or trekking into the Kalahari, a freighter passage might just offer what our relentlessly connected age has made difficult, if not impossible: splendid isolation.

I always run without music. Being disconnected is what I'm addicted to more than anything. There aren't many places where you can be without your phone and computer. I've started to crave and enjoy that time alone.

I just love to disconnect from everything sometimes.

We live in such an isolating time with technology and social media and I think that creates this feeling of having to connect, of having so many ways to connect but nothing's connecting.

As we continue to become a society of tweets, shorter and shorter messages, there's great value in the contemplation and reflection that comes from reading a long body of work.

The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.

Take time to be quiet. This is something that we don't do enough in this busy world of ours. We rush, rush, rush, and we are constantly listening to noise all around us. The human heart was meant for times of quiet, to peer deep within. It is when we do this that our hearts are set free to soar and take flight on the wings of our own dreams! Schedule some quiet "dream time" this week. No other people. No cell phone. No computer. Just you, a pad, a pen, and your thoughts.

Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops.

Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.

One thing that's interesting to me is how we as humans seem to be losing our ability to stand still and be alone with our thoughts. If you want to, you have to arrange it now. You have to go off where there's no WiFi and leave your equipment behind, but still have some sort of GPS tracking to make sure you don't get lost or die.

The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.

In this modern world where activity is stressed almost to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet a child's need for quietness is the same today as it has always been--it may even be greater--for quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.

Being alone with yourself is increasingly unpopular.

The difference between me and many young people is, I don't carry music with me. I like to think. I don't use any modern convenience to be talking to other people, because I like my time to think. I go to the garden in the morning, and this time, I'm thinking ideas, I'm not drawing, I'm thinking.

In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts.

Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources – it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources.

We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication.

Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.

I basically camped out for a year and a half in an Airstream trailer on the beach out in front of the studio. I had no idea what I was gonna do, what kind of album I was gonna make - all I knew was that I wanted to sit there and just take in whatever came.