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My greatest inspiration is memory.

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

Boredom Hero Novelists
Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
PAUL THEROUX

Chance Fiction Giving Second
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

Book Order People
It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
PAUL THEROUX

Magical Place Travel Worst
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

Home Memories Perfect
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
PAUL THEROUX

Feeling Mind Travel
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

Alive Grateful Squinting
You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
PAUL THEROUX

Need Patience Writer
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

Career Country White
Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
PAUL THEROUX

Animal Loner Lover
My greatest inspiration is memory.
PAUL THEROUX

Country Inspiration Memories People
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

Home People Thinking
I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
PAUL THEROUX

Emotion Love Thinking Twenties
Writing … is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
PAUL THEROUX

Competitive Persons Writing
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
PAUL THEROUX

Help Helping Mutual Weakness
One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
PAUL THEROUX

Buddhism Neglect Principles

My greatest inspiration is memory.

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My greatest inspiration is memory.

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