Quote

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
Last
Anthem
Doesn
Futile
Past
Bore
Back
Bores
Mean
Ignore
Lessons
Days
Reminiscence
Lasts
Bastion

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The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
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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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Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
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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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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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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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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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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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Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
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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 a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
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...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple.
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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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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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I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
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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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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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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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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.
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