You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
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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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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I don’t think that it’s possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it’s simple.
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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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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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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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Writing … is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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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 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.
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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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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 is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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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