You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
Paul TherouxFriendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
Paul TherouxSightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
Paul TherouxI 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.
Paul TherouxThe larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the same qualities that made English people seem stubborn and secretive made them, face to face, reliable and true to their word. I thought: The English do small things well and big things badly.
Paul Theroux