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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
Much
Findings
People
Finding
Animals
Animal
Wonderful
Enlightening
Around
Educational
Look
Driving
Looks
Necessarily

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He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.
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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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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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It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
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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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Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I've ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare.
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The biggest surprise was that a country like Angola, that has so much money, that produces so much oil, would be in such a mess and so difficult to travel in. Something is almost cursed in striking oil. It's like the lottery winner who ends up broke.
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Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure.
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No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.
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The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space
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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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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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Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.
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Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
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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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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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You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
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I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.
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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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Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.
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