Quote

Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
World
Observation
Luxury
Induces
Enemy
Spoils
Feeling
Costly
Knowing
Prevents
Feelings
Indulgence
Nothing
Spoil
Good
Notice

More quotes by 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.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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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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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.
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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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I sought trains I found passengers.
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Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.
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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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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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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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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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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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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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I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
Paul Theroux
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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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.
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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.
Paul Theroux