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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.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Quiet
Relieved
Reader
Dedication
Serious
Spirits
Word
Minded
Spirit
Alike
Omnivorous
Think
Readers
Talkative
Thinking
Intense
Eagerly
Meet
Kindred

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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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Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.
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A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.
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I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.
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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.
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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
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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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He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.
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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.
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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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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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Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
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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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I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.
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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
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The journey, not the arrival, matters the voyage, not the landing.
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I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.
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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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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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