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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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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Johnson
Drag
Maturity
Main
Sort
Peace
Corps
Howard

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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don't want to relax. I want to see something.
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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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I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple.
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People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.
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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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I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
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The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
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Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
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Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
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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.
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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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When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
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Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.
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Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
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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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Travel is about failure or overcoming obstacles, overcoming failures. When a traveler is having lots of good luck, that is not a happy book. That's a book you say, well, I don't need that. I want a life lesson. I want to find out - I want a journey that reflects my life.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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