Alexander Theroux Quotes

It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.

September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.

I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason.

Why should a blacksmith put his hands in the fire if he has tongs?

Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the caliber of a bullet, teething beads.

Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.

One's style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.

A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion.

Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.

If on a friend’s bookshelf You cannot find Joyce or Sterne Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton, You are in danger, face the fact, So kick him first or punch him hard And from him hide behind a curtain.

Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.

Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.

Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of accomplishing nothing.

Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.

Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.

I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply a means of passing time.

I kneel to my Lord because I am such a failure. I pray, I hope, I look to the Gospels.

Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?

The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.

The ears, which master the face of a dunce, are that part of the head which most publishes stupidity.

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends, " says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.

Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combinedwith the imperative of accomplishing nothing.