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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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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Lessons
Days
Reminiscence
Lasts
Bastion
Last
Anthem
Doesn
Futile
Past
Bore
Back
Bores
Mean
Ignore

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
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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.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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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.
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I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
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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.
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The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
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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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I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.
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A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.
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It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space
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The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it.
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Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
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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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When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.
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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
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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.
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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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