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A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Time
Quite
Travels
Comes
Inventing
Someone
Writes
Back
Sees
Book
Somewhere
Hard
Ground
Writing
Travel
Something
Goes
Spends

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
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Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
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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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I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.
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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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There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.
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When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost.
Paul Theroux
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I sought trains I found passengers.
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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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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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Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.
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The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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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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.
Paul Theroux
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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
Paul Theroux
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One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
Paul Theroux
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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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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
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You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.
Paul Theroux