Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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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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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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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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
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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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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.
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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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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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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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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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I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
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…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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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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I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom.
PAUL THEROUX