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 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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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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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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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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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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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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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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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.
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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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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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Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
PAUL THEROUX