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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.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Reasons
Travel
Emotion
Greatest
Makes
Place
Arrived
Reason
Described
Ever
Anywhere

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
Paul Theroux
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Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
Paul Theroux
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It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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.
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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Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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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
Paul Theroux
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A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.
Paul Theroux
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I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
Paul Theroux
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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.
Paul Theroux
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The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.
Paul Theroux
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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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Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
Paul Theroux