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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
Book
Somewhere
Hard
Ground
Writing
Travel
Something
Goes
Spends
Time
Quite
Travels
Comes
Inventing
Someone
Writes
Back
Sees
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I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.
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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.
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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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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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The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
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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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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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The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
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Tibet has a very proud people but it's culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It's like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it's gone.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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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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One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
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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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Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
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You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
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