Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
PAUL THEROUXSometimes 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.
More Paul Theroux Quotes
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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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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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 always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom.
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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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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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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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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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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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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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Writing … is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
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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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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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The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
PAUL THEROUX