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" Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, it needs an angle, it needs a 'sound bite. "
Paul Theroux
Corruption
Train
Talking
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" When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there. "
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" It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources. "
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" Dentists seem to me very orderly, businesslike people who appear to become somewhat bored with the routine of their work after a period of time. Perhaps I'm wrong. "
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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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" 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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" I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels. "
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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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" 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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" I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely. "
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" When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen. "
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" Travel is glamorous only in retrospect. "
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" There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment. "
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" The people I've known who've done great things of that type - you know, building hospitals, running schools - are very humble people. They give their lives to the project. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming. "
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" You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend. "
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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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" The more you write, the more you're capable of writing. "
Paul Theroux
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Capable
" Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tedium, and this is why I choose to travel alone. "
Paul Theroux
Alone
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" Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves. "
Paul Theroux
Writing
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" 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. "
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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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" 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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" A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about having a very bad time; having a miserable time, even better. "
Paul Theroux
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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. "
Paul Theroux
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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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" Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind. "
Paul Theroux
Feeling
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" 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. "
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" I should start by saying that traveling in the States is a bit like traveling in Asia. You need it, it helps to have an introduction - that there is a certain network. "
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