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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
Based
Stage
Actors
Sightseeing
Play
Rehearsing
Like
Fled
Imaginative
Sets
Invention

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People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.
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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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Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
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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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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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Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
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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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The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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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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Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
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In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937 Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan.
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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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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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It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
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I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple.
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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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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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