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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
Understand
Hawaii
Live
Tourists
Look
Weren
Looks
Million
Years
Necessary
Would
Millions
Tourist
Economy
Tourism
Year
Visitors

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...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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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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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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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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I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
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Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
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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 greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.
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Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.
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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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Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari Africans don't.
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Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.
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It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
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My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.
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You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.
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Tibet has a very proud people but it's culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It's like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it's gone.
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The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
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People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.
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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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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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