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I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Still
Isolation
Ideas
Phone
Like
Phones
Solitude
Lonely
Connected
Idea
Stills

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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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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I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
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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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When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
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The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
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The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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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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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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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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A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
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You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
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Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
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Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.
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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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In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937 Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan.
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Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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