Quote

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.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Well
Happen
Going
Left
Africa
Years
Place
Developing
Never
Happens
Direction
Think
Kids
Seemed
Thinking
Stills
Case
People
Still
Cases
Wells
Particular

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I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
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The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
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Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.
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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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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.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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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.
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I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.
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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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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.
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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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I think I understand passion. Love is something else.
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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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The journey, not the arrival, matters the voyage, not the landing.
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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.
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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.
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The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space
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Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
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Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
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