Paul Theroux Quotes
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A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler. Nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness.
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People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.
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Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
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I am happy being what I am.
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He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.
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You can't save the rhinos and you can't preserve a culture. I'm very pessimistic. Once it's gone, it's over.
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My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.
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... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.
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The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
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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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Painters strike me as having warm uncomplicated friendships and probably more natural generosity than the practitioners of any other art. Perhaps this is because painting is such a portable, flexible thing.
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The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it.
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The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the whole point of work, of life, of love.
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One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
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Reading liberates you. You could know about the world through reading.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.
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Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.
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Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
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If people are driving you around to look at animals, that's wonderful. That's educational, but it's not necessarily enlightening and you're not finding out much about yourself.
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Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.
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I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.
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In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.
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I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in my opinion. This version of masculinity is a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one's entire life (by contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppressive sense of nakedness).
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Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.
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Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way
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I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
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Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.
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