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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Perfected
Japanese
Sarcastic
Rude
Manners
Made
Good
Indistinguishable
Rudeness

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When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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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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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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The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
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The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.
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Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
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The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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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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I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
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A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.
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The traveler's boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience - shocking though it may seem at the time - is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.
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...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
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The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space
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Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure.
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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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