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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.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Rather
Finding
Travels
Use
Wrote
Novelist
Three
Mark
Traveler
Stories
Travel
Uses
Book
Places
Novelists
Great
Wouldn
Background
Books
Backgrounds
Four
Findings
Twain

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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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.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
Paul Theroux
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I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
Paul Theroux
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It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
Paul Theroux
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One of the upsides of tourism is that people begin to take themselves a little more seriously (and think their) culture is worth something. So rather than disparaging the local culture, they vitalize it.
Paul Theroux
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If people are driving you around to look at animals, that's wonderful. That's educational, but it's not necessarily enlightening and you're not finding out much about yourself.
Paul Theroux
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The journey, not the arrival, matters the voyage, not the landing.
Paul Theroux
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Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
Paul Theroux
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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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My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.
Paul Theroux
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The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937 Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan.
Paul Theroux
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The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
Paul Theroux
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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
Paul Theroux