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.
Paul TherouxRead
Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of independence for aspiring writers, contrasting it with the support typically provided by parents to athletes.
Paul Theroux's quote reflects on the different paths to success for writers compared to Olympic athletes. While athletes often receive direct support from their parents, such as being driven to practices, writers must cultivate their craft independently. Theroux advises young writers to leave home to develop their unique voice and experiences, suggesting that personal growth and exploration outside of one's comfort zone are essential for creativity and success in writing.
Themes
WritingIndependenceCreativitySuccessPersonal Growth
In practice
Example use cases
A motivational speech for aspiring writers at a literary festival.
More from Paul Theroux
All quotes →I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
Paul TherouxRead
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
Paul TherouxRead
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.
Paul TherouxRead
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
Paul TherouxRead
You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
Paul TherouxRead
Similar quotes
For me, I guess the main motivation is the satisfaction of finally understanding some tricky mathematical concept or phenomenon and then explaining it to others.
Terence TaoRead
A dollar put into a book and a book mastered might change the whole course of a boy's life. It might easily be the beginning of the development of leadership that would carry the boy far in service to his fellow men.
Henry FordRead
Islam tells us every girl and boy should be educated. I don't know why the Taliban have forgotten it.
Malala YousafzaiRead
I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a story without concern for precision or freshness in the use of language. Some of this storytelling reads as if it were spoken rather than written, stuffed with tired images that pop into the writer's head because they are so familiar. The top of the head is fit for growing hair, but not for generating fine prose.
Sol SteinRead
I think children love reading, and they will make time for it if we put the right books into their hands. And I hope I get the chance to keep being one of the people that writes them.
Rick RiordanRead
Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!
Chinua AchebeRead