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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
Many
Neither
Would
Comfort
Candour
Like
Conversation
Trains
People
Journey
Dining
Knowledge
Derived
Easy
Shared
Others
Train
Certain
Car
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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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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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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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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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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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Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
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It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory.
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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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When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen.
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Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
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I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.
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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.
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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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Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.
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The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.
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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure.
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