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.
PAUL THEROUXFriendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
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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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.
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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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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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The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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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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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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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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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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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.
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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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Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
PAUL THEROUX