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

Paul Theroux

Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
PAUL THEROUX

Animal Loner Lover
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
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.
PAUL THEROUX

Boston Childhood Maine
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
Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
PAUL THEROUX

Mine Travel Trip
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
I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom.
PAUL THEROUX

Company Found Reminder
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
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

Book Pages Reading
Writing … is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
PAUL THEROUX

Competitive Persons Writing
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
Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
PAUL THEROUX

Chance Fiction Giving Second
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
PAUL THEROUX

Feeling Mind Travel
My greatest inspiration is memory.
PAUL THEROUX

Country Inspiration Memories People
You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
PAUL THEROUX

Need Patience Writer
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 THEROUX

Home People Thinking
I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
PAUL THEROUX

Emotion Love Thinking Twenties
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
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
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
The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
PAUL THEROUX

Book Slim Volume
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.
PAUL THEROUX

Hawaii Look Years
…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
PAUL THEROUX

Artist Country might People Society
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
Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
PAUL THEROUX

Bad Decision Men

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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