Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Paul Theroux Quotes. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Paul Theroux Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.
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Love doesn’t last.
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I wanted the Peace Corps to be something very vague and unorganized, and to a large extent it was. It did not run smoothly. The consequence was that we were left alone.
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Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.
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To me, writing is a considered act. It’s something which is a great labor of thought and consideration.
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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
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One of my fears is not writing. I don’t know how to do anything else.
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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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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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People who don’t read books a lot are threatened by books.
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Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.
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The more you write, the more you’re capable of writing.
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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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I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone babbling.
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I think there is only one way to write fiction – alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.
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I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.
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Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.
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People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.
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The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something – a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unusual is a very sustaining thing in travel.
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My father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn’t know what he did. But my kids were privy to the ups and downs of a writer’s life.
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Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.
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