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Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Residence
Motion
Travel
Attitude
State
States
Mind

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
Paul Theroux
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If people are driving you around to look at animals, that's wonderful. That's educational, but it's not necessarily enlightening and you're not finding out much about yourself.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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The Colombians are good-tempered people. They are used to waiting for buses that are late, used to riding buses and trains that do not arrive.
Paul Theroux
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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
Paul Theroux
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He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.
Paul Theroux
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Tibet has a very proud people but it's culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It's like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it's gone.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
Paul Theroux
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I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.
Paul Theroux
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I sought trains I found passengers.
Paul Theroux
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
Paul Theroux
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The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
Paul Theroux
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There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space
Paul Theroux