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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.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Way
Bold
Time
Passings
Think
Guilty
Thinking
Passing
Travel
Ways
Laziest
Secret
Travellers
Earth
Traveller

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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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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Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
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The man who is tired of London is tired of looking for a parking space
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When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost.
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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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I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
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The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.
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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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Travel is about failure or overcoming obstacles, overcoming failures. When a traveler is having lots of good luck, that is not a happy book. That's a book you say, well, I don't need that. I want a life lesson. I want to find out - I want a journey that reflects my life.
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One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
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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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The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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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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Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
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Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
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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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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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