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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
Japanese
Sarcastic
Rude
Manners
Made
Good
Indistinguishable
Rudeness
Perfected

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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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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The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
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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.
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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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I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple.
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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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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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Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
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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.
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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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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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Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
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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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Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
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The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space
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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 more you write, the more you're capable of writing.
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I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.
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The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
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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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