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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.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Fall
Apart
Anarchy
Place
Private
Thieves
Ever
Walking
Nightmare
Country
Beyond
Glass
Like
Full
Falling
Albania
World
Seen
Glasses
Strangest
People
Looking
Third
Paranoid
Living
Thirds
Farming

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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.
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Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.
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I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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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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Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
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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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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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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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Basically, what you find out is the limits of your patience and your strength and your capacity to adapt. You find that out in travel and being alone and being tested. So that's a great thing.
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The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again.
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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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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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Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
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Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
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Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life
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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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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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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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