A Quote by Paul Theroux

Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.

Paul Theroux

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Happens Nature Now Now And Then Something Something Unexpected Stays Then Travel Traveler Trip Unexpected Whole

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Paul Theroux
American - Novelist
Born: April 10, 1941

A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler. Nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness.

Paul Theroux

What happens a lot with songwriting is that a melody or rhythm or something stays with you like catching a cold. And during that time what happens is that I can then fit things on to it, it all fits and glues together. Sometimes it's crazy cos it can almost be anything. But if you catch the cold then the nonsense makes sense. It's like you're getting beamed it, like with a ouija board and something's pushing your hand. It's not a pleasant experience necessarily.

Thom Yorke

There is a very big difference between American and British travel journalism, and that's this whole business of the assisted or freebie trip. In Britain we are unashamed about any travel company paying for you to go and then writing about it. That's the only way we can do it. But I have tried the same in the States, and I can't write for any sizeable American newspaper because they tell you to do it on this basis.

John Gimlette

[In the case of research director, Willis R. Whitney, whose style was to give talented investigators as much freedom as possible, you may define "serendipity" as] the art of profiting from unexpected occurrences. When you do things in that way you get unexpected results. Then you do something else and you get unexpected results in another line, and you do that on a third line and then all of a sudden you see that one of these lines has something to do with the other. Then you make a discovery that you never could have made by going on a direct road.

Irving Langmuir

Only now have I finally realized that my life has been an unending field trip. And I have tried hard not to be a tourist. But to be an adventurer, a traveler, an explorer, a learner, and a pilgrim.

Robert Fulghum

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

I find the whole time travel question very unsettling if you take it to its logical extension. I think it might eventually be possible, but then what happens?

William Shatner

If you want to know the reality of life, then you should travel. At first travel your country, after that start travelling the world. Travel to know your surroundings so that we can say that you are an aware person. Nature, people and culture are calling you, so travel.

Imran Khan

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

The [travel] writer, looking back at the journey from a distance of a year or two (or three), is a different character from the hapless character who undertook the trip: wise after the event, with the leisure to tease out meanings from the experience that the distracted traveler never had, and often impatient with his alter ego's blinkered and unsatisfactory version of things.

Jonathan Raban

So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.

Orson Scott Card

The traveler used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this encounter.

Daniel J. Boorstin

It's interesting when you write something for somebody else, and then you're like, 'Oh man, I just laid my whole trip on them, and they don't even know!'

My theory is that you find out who your true friends are when something good happens to you, not when something bad happens to you. Everybody loves you when something bad happens to you. Then you're easy to love.

Lisa Scottoline

My dad was young; he went to work. But he'd been to war. He'd seen some of the world. It wasn't like he was going to be an extensive traveler or something. It didn't seem to be in his nature or in the nature of his parents or many of the folks in my family, really.

Bruce Springsteen

Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific - this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

Alison Gopnik

A Quote by Paul Theroux

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