Quote

Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Failure
Unprecedented
Success
Orders
Shortages
Order
Produced
Seams
Wells
Enterprise
Enterprises
Well
Indian
Disruption
Work
Disaster
Disasters
Made
Seemed
Shortage
Finally
Burst

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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 think I understand passion. Love is something else.
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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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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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Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.
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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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...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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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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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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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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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.
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Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
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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.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
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The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.
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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
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I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.
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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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