Quote

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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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Helping
Condition
Amounts
Seems
Conditions
Contained
Ones
Traveling
Self
Amount
Islands
Love
Small
Obsession
World
Known
Worlds
Help
Larger
Craze
Understand
Reasonable
Pathological

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
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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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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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Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
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Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
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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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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 sought trains I found passengers.
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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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Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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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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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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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 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 is glamorous only in retrospect.
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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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A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
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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.
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The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
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