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 THEROUXThe 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.
More Paul Theroux Quotes
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You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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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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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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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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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.
PAUL THEROUX -
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 -
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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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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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical 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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The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
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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.
PAUL THEROUX