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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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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Find
Memory
Might
Travel
Great
Places
Idealised
Memories
Unstated
Looking
Exemplify
Perfect
Happiest
Home
Versions
Reason
Indeed

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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I don't look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren't there, there would be no economy. So I understand why a tourist economy is necessary.
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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
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Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
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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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Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
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The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.
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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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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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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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A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
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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 lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
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Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.
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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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I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple.
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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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There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.
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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.
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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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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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