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" Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. "
Paul Theroux
Night
Good
Great
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" I do not want to be young again. "
Paul Theroux
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" One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else. "
Paul Theroux
Know
Fears
Anything
" I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't want people to ask me questions about it. "
Paul Theroux
Family
Travel
Questions
" Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. 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. "
Paul Theroux
Mark
Great
Travel
" There are two places that are hard to write about. A place like Britain, England in particular, which has been written about by everybody, and then the place that's never been written about. "
Paul Theroux
Hard
Like
Two
" Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. "
Paul Theroux
Train
Maine
Boston
" Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial. "
Paul Theroux
Proud
Roots
Know
" The idea of traveling in Africa for me is based on going by road or train or bus or whatever and crossing borders. You can't travel easily or at all through some countries. "
Paul Theroux
Train
You
Travel
" I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster. "
Paul Theroux
Think
Like
Serious
" 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.' "
Paul Theroux
Hope
Work
Moment
" The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness. "
Paul Theroux
Made
Good Manners
Them
" The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume. "
Paul Theroux
Etiquette
Volume
Very
" What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself. "
Paul Theroux
Yourself
Me
Life
" It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources. "
Paul Theroux
Fall
You
Nothing
" To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. "
Paul Theroux
Labor
Act
Writing
" An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed. "
Paul Theroux
Been
Geography
Up
" 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. "
Paul Theroux
Feel
You
Look
" Nyasaland was the perfect country for a volunteer. It was friendly and destitute; it was small and out-of-the-way. It had all of Africa's problems - poverty, ignorance, disease. "
Paul Theroux
Problems
Poverty
Small
" The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity. "
Paul Theroux
Sort
Peace Corps
Peace
" If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think. "
Paul Theroux
Home
Like
People
" The Trans-Siberian Express is like a cruise across an oceanic landscape. I've done it three times. "
Paul Theroux
Done
Landscape
Like
" A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form. "
Paul Theroux
Other
Essence
Form
" I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees. "
Paul Theroux
Children
Travel
Love
" You leave the States, and you see people have bigger problems than you, much worse problems than you. "
Paul Theroux
People
Worse
You
" People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it. "
Paul Theroux
Waiting
Wait
Sick
" Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. "
Paul Theroux
Winter
Recovery
Preparation
" What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known one's whole life. "
Paul Theroux
Life
Realization
People
" 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. "
Paul Theroux
Never
Travel
Think
" The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming. "
Paul Theroux
Overwhelming
Travel
Hassle
" The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place. "
Paul Theroux
Place
Travel
Columbus