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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.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Death
Endless
Night
Ultimate
Art
Value
May
Cause
Make
Joy
Love
Causes
Contemplate
Life
Passion
Contemplating
Values
Awful

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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Basically, what you find out is the limits of your patience and your strength and your capacity to adapt. You find that out in travel and being alone and being tested. So that's a great thing.
Paul Theroux
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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
Paul Theroux
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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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One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
Paul Theroux
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Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
Paul Theroux
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Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari Africans don't.
Paul Theroux
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Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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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The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.
Paul Theroux
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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux