Quote

You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Travel
Pilots
Late
Crash
Journey
Airplane
Food
Define
Funny
Weren
Nauseated
Didn
Flight
Hijacked
Good
Throw
Negatives
Grateful
Insightful

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I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.
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Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.
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The journey, not the arrival, matters the voyage, not the landing.
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I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.
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Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
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Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life
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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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One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
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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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Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
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A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.
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To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it's a paradox of this sort of parallel life. A safari is an expensive experience and it's adjacent to a place where people are having a very tough time.
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Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
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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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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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A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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