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Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
People
Stranger
Putting
Kindness
Travel
Rewarding
Certainly
Trusting
Hands
Depending
Kind
Strangers
Life
Involves

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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The traveler's boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience - shocking though it may seem at the time - is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.
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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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I sought trains I found passengers.
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Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
Paul Theroux
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A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
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He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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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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.
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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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Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
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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.
Paul Theroux
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The journey, not the arrival, matters the voyage, not the landing.
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 don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
Paul Theroux
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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