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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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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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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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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
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The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again.
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I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
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No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.
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The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
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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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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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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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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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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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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 lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
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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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I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.
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It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
Paul Theroux
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When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost.
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.
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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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