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 THEROUXIt 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.
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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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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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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You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
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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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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 -
…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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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.
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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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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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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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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
PAUL THEROUX