If you’re a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don’t like other people. I’m not like that, I don’t think.
PAUL THEROUXSometimes people read a book in order to not go on a trip. You read a book instead of going on the trip. And so the travel writer is doing the traveling for you.
More Paul Theroux Quotes
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The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate’s career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.
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Writing … is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
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Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.
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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
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I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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I don’t think that it’s possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it’s simple.
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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.
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The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
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Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it.
PAUL THEROUX