Quote

Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Imaginative
Sets
Invention
Based
Stage
Actors
Sightseeing
Play
Rehearsing
Like
Fled

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Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.
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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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I sought trains I found passengers.
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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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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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Basically, what you find out is the limits of your patience and your strength and your capacity to adapt. You find that out in travel and being alone and being tested. So that's a great thing.
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The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
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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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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari Africans don't.
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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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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
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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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Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
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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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I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.
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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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There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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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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