Paul Theroux Quotes
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I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.
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I think I am typical in believing that the Peace Corps trained us brilliantly and then did little more except send us into the bush. It was not a bad way of running things.
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The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.
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The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.
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A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
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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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An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.
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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
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The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the whole point of work, of life, of love.'
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Travel magazines are just one cupcake after another. They're not about travel. The travel magazine is, in fact, about the opposite of travel. It's about having a nice time on a honeymoon, or whatever.
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The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that equals the Yangtze River, that equals the Nile. We have the greatest cities in the world - among the greatest cities in the world.
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Men in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
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If you look at a map, you see that Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. It's 17 hours of straight flying from London. It's very far away, and sometimes you feel as if you're on another planet. But I like that. Also, that's ideal for writing.
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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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I think that love isn't what you think it is when you're in your twenties or even thirties.
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I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist, but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
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You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.
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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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You may not know it but I'm no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in.
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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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I was kind of raised with the suggestion that I had a duty to do; that life was real, life was earnest. And I hated that, actually. I needed to be liberated, to be told that I could live the life that I wanted to live; that I didn't need a job, or to be shouted at; that I could be myself; that I could be happy.
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In many ways connection has been disastrous. We have confused information (of which there has been too much of) with ideas (of which there are too few. I found out much more about the world and myself by being unconnected.
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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.
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I think I understand passion. Love is something else.