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 THEROUXMen in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
More Paul Theroux Quotes
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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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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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…a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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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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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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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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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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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.
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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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You can’t want to be a writer. You have to be one.
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Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
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Writing … is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
PAUL THEROUX