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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Funny
Inspirational
Retrospect
Glamorous
Silly
Travel
Journey

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The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
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If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think.
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The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.
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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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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 practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
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My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.
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I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.
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Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.
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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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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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Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
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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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One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
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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.
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It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
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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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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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