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I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
People
Heard
Books
Read
Running
Book
Never
Think
Constantly
Thinking
Across

More quotes by 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 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.
Paul Theroux
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The journey, not the arrival, matters the voyage, not the landing.
Paul Theroux
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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
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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I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.
Paul Theroux
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The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
Paul Theroux
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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
Paul Theroux
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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.
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.
Paul Theroux
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I think I understand passion. Love is something else.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
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