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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Opinion
Everyone
Life
Solution
Solutions

More quotes by 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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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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Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.
Paul Theroux
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It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
Paul Theroux
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Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.
Paul Theroux
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Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
Paul Theroux
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People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.
Paul Theroux
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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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Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
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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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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Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
Paul Theroux
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Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
Paul Theroux
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I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple.
Paul Theroux
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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.
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