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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.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Persons
Happen
Person
Maybe
Thing
Happened
Life
Four
Like
Times
Pointed
Didn
Gun
Happens
Travel
Young
Worst

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think.
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I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.
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Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
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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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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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Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
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I sought trains I found passengers.
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Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
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The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
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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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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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Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.
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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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My house is a place I have spent many years improving to the point where I have no desire to leave it.
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I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.
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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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You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.
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I don't look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren't there, there would be no economy. So I understand why a tourist economy is necessary.
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When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
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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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