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
Self
Ones
Traveling
Love
Amount
Islands
World
Small
Obsession
Known
Worlds
Help
Larger
Craze
Understand
Reasonable
Pathological

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
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Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.
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...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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The biggest surprise was that a country like Angola, that has so much money, that produces so much oil, would be in such a mess and so difficult to travel in. Something is almost cursed in striking oil. It's like the lottery winner who ends up broke.
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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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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
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No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.
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The journey, not the arrival, matters the voyage, not the landing.
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Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
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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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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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You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
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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.
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The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.
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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.
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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
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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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Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
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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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