Quote

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
Write
Domesticity
Order
Manufacture
Better
Turmoil
Feel
Domestic
Feels
Happier
Writing
Unhappy
Even
Writers
Something
Though

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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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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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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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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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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space
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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 don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
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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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Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
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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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Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.
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Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life
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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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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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Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.
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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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I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
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One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
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