Paul Theroux

“It’s more necessary than ever to find the empathetic experience of meeting another person, being in another culture, to smell it, to suffer it, to put up with the hardship and the nuisances of travel, all of that matters,” Theroux said. He quoted the Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul, who at various moments in Theroux’s writing career was a mentor and a nemesis: “I believe that the present, accurately seized, foretells the future.”

And Theroux agrees. “You don’t have to make forecasts,” he said. “You just write about the things that you see, the things that you hear, the things that you sense, and when you write that, you’re a prophet.” Article