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If people are driving you around to look at animals, that's wonderful. That's educational, but it's not necessarily enlightening and you're not finding out much about yourself.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Look
Driving
Looks
Necessarily
Much
Findings
People
Finding
Animals
Animal
Wonderful
Enlightening
Around
Educational

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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The Colombians are good-tempered people. They are used to waiting for buses that are late, used to riding buses and trains that do not arrive.
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Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
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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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Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.
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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 don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
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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 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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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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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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In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937 Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan.
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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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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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When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen.
Paul Theroux
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He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.
Paul Theroux
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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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Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
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I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don't want to relax. I want to see something.
Paul Theroux
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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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