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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.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Live
Tourists
Look
Weren
Looks
Million
Years
Necessary
Would
Millions
Tourist
Economy
Tourism
Year
Visitors
Understand
Hawaii

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The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
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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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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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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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I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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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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