The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
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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I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
PAUL THEROUX -
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 THEROUX -
I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom.
PAUL THEROUX -
It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.
PAUL THEROUX -
Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
PAUL THEROUX -
Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
PAUL THEROUX -
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
PAUL THEROUX -
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.
PAUL THEROUX -
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.
PAUL THEROUX -
…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
PAUL THEROUX -
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.
PAUL THEROUX -
It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory.
PAUL THEROUX -
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.
PAUL THEROUX -
Writing … is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
PAUL THEROUX -
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.
PAUL THEROUX