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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Mind
Extensive
Traveling
Contracts
Travel
Feeling
Feelings
Firsts
Broadening
First
Induces

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The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
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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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I don't look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren't there, there would be no economy. So I understand why a tourist economy is necessary.
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It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
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He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.
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It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory.
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The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
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I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
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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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I think I understand passion. Love is something else.
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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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Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.
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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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You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.
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The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
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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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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.
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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
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Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.
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A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.
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