I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
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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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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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 don’t think that it’s possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it’s simple.
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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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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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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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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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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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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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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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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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Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
PAUL THEROUX