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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.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Better
Turmoil
Feel
Domestic
Feels
Happier
Writing
Unhappy
Even
Writers
Something
Though
Write
Domesticity
Order
Manufacture

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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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When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen.
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The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
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I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.
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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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Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.
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I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.
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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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Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari Africans don't.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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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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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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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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Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.
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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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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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Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.
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Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
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The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.
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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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