Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
PAUL THEROUXSomeone 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.
More Paul Theroux Quotes
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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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The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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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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I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
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Writing … is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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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.
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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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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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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.
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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.
PAUL THEROUX







