Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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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I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom.
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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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Sometimes 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.
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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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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 -
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 -
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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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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I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
PAUL THEROUX -
Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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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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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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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.
PAUL THEROUX






