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You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.

Paul Theroux

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

Career Country White
The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
PAUL THEROUX

Book Slim Volume
…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
PAUL THEROUX

Artist Country might People Society
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.
PAUL THEROUX

Boredom Hero Novelists
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

Earth Secret Thinking
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.
PAUL THEROUX

Book Order People
I don’t think that it’s possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it’s simple.
PAUL THEROUX

Experiences Reward Simple Thinking
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
PAUL THEROUX

Help Helping Mutual Weakness
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 THEROUX

Alive Grateful Squinting
Writing … is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
PAUL THEROUX

Competitive Persons Writing
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.
PAUL THEROUX

Book Novelist Travel
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.
PAUL THEROUX

Home Memories Perfect
It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
PAUL THEROUX

Magical Place Travel Worst
One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
PAUL THEROUX

Buddhism Neglect Principles
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
PAUL THEROUX

Feeling Mind Travel
You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
PAUL THEROUX

Need Patience Writer

You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.

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You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.

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Popular Authors

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