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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

BookNovelistTravel

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

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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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  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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  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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  I don’t think that it’s possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it’s simple.

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

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  …a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.

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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.

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  Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.

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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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  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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  Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

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

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