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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
Feelings
Indulgence
Nothing
Spoil
Good
Notice
World
Observation
Luxury
Induces
Enemy
Spoils
Feeling
Costly
Knowing
Prevents
More quotes by Paul Theroux
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
Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
Paul Theroux
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.
Paul Theroux
Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.
Paul Theroux
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.
Paul Theroux
I sought trains I found passengers.
Paul Theroux
Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
Paul Theroux
The biggest surprise was that a country like Angola, that has so much money, that produces so much oil, would be in such a mess and so difficult to travel in. Something is almost cursed in striking oil. It's like the lottery winner who ends up broke.
Paul Theroux
I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.
Paul Theroux
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
The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it.
Paul Theroux
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.
Paul Theroux
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.
Paul Theroux
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.
Paul Theroux
One of the upsides of tourism is that people begin to take themselves a little more seriously (and think their) culture is worth something. So rather than disparaging the local culture, they vitalize it.
Paul Theroux
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
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
Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.
Paul Theroux
Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
Paul Theroux
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