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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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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Rewarding
Destination
Reaching
Cease
Travel
Becomes
Living
Indistinguishable
Life
Ceases

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
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Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.
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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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The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
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Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.
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One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
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The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
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I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
Paul Theroux
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Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
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The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
Paul Theroux
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Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
Paul Theroux
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The journey, not the arrival, matters the voyage, not the landing.
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.
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I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
Paul Theroux
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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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A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.
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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
Paul Theroux
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I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.
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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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