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 THEROUXAnimal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
More Paul Theroux Quotes
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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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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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…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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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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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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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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I don’t think that it’s possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it’s simple.
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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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Writing … is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
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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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You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I’d touched bottom.
PAUL THEROUX