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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

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

Related Topics

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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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  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.

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  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.

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  I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom.

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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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  The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

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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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  Writing … is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.

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  It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.

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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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  You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.

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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 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.

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  One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.

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  Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

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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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