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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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Tibet has a very proud people but it's culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It's like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it's gone.
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Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
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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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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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The journey, not the arrival, matters the voyage, not the landing.
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The biggest surprise was that a country like Angola, that has so much money, that produces so much oil, would be in such a mess and so difficult to travel in. Something is almost cursed in striking oil. It's like the lottery winner who ends up broke.
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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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Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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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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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
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The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.
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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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I sought trains I found passengers.
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...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.
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The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space
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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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Writers are painful friends, and they are seldom friendly with others. They are insecure in the presence of other writers. Composers of certain kinds of music are the same--tormented and intolerant. Yet some arts not only make the artist social but make him depend upon sociability in order to succeed. Painting is one.
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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.
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