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 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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I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
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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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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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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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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 think that it’s possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it’s simple.
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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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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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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
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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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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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My greatest inspiration is memory.
PAUL THEROUX