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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical 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
Worst
Almost
Take
Axiomatic
Trains
Magical
Train
Travel
Places

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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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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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My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.
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Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
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I think I understand passion. Love is something else.
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When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.
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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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I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.
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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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Writers are painful friends, and they are seldom friendly with others. They are insecure in the presence of other writers. Composers of certain kinds of music are the same--tormented and intolerant. Yet some arts not only make the artist social but make him depend upon sociability in order to succeed. Painting is one.
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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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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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The journey, not the arrival, matters the voyage, not the landing.
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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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