Quote

The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Certain
Car
Many
Neither
Would
Comfort
Candour
Like
Conversation
Trains
People
Journey
Dining
Knowledge
Derived
Easy
Shared
Others
Train

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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.
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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
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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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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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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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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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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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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.
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Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
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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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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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I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don't want to relax. I want to see something.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
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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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The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
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Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I've ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare.
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I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.
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One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
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