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Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Practically
Competitive
Activity
Persons
Person
Writing

More quotes by 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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The traveler's boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience - shocking though it may seem at the time - is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.
Paul Theroux
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Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
Paul Theroux
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I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life
Paul Theroux
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I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.
Paul Theroux
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Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I've ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare.
Paul Theroux
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Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
Paul Theroux
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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.
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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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.
Paul Theroux
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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
Paul Theroux
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To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it's a paradox of this sort of parallel life. A safari is an expensive experience and it's adjacent to a place where people are having a very tough time.
Paul Theroux
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Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.
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 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