Paul Theroux Quotes

My job, and that's my job, is to dress the naked truth. To make it interesting, to make it viable, to make it seem like something you understand and feel and love.

A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher; he's just someone who is witness to what is around him. And so writing is a way to... it's the best way to testify, to be a witness.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

Storytelling is the important thing.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

The cool thing about being a songwriter, or a writer, I guess, in general, you can take on a lot of different things, experience a lot of different things, just by writing about them.

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

I've always loved writing, and the impulse for me is storytelling. I don't sit down and think: 'What political message can I sell?' I love the creativity of it.

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.

This is a cliche, but in fiction, I feel it is easier for me to get to some sort of truth, some kind of more honest writing.

I tell stories. That's what I do. I've always told stories.

I write my songs because I've lived them.

Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.

Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

I have an obligation as a writer to tell a story as interestingly as possible, but with integrity and not inserting false drama... I'm looking to be subtle, but being a wordsmith does not interest me - I want to communicate.

Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'