You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
PAUL THEROUXYou think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.
More Paul Theroux Quotes
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One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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Sometimes 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.
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Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn’t say that I’m a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels – and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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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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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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Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
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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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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.
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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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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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I don’t look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren’t there, there would be no economy. So I understand why a tourist economy is necessary.
PAUL THEROUX