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 THEROUXOne of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
More Paul Theroux Quotes
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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 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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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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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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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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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 -
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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The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
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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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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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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.
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