Alexander Theroux Quotes

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

Alexander Theroux

#2. There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.

Alexander Theroux

#3. The best reason for disbelieving in God is that he never gave us enough time in life to pursue enough knowledge to find sufficient truth.

Alexander Theroux

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

Alexander Theroux

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

Alexander Theroux

#6. The complexity of language, he thought to himself, lies not in its subject matter but in our knotted understanding.

Alexander Theroux

#7. Nothing is more subtly destructive than a closed circle of artists feeding on one another. Envy grows from insignificant differences between people, not from overwhelming inequalities ... it was envy that forced them to emulate each other, not esteem.

Alexander Theroux

#8. When people call up Rush Limbaugh and say, 'It's an honor to speak to you,' I want to shoot myself.

Alexander Theroux

#9. The urge for Chinese food is always unpredictable: famous for no occasion, standard fare for no holiday, and the constant as to demand is either whim, the needy plebiscite of instantly famished drunks, or pregnancy.

Alexander Theroux

#10. 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.

Alexander Theroux

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

Alexander Theroux

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

Alexander Theroux

#13. Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.

Alexander Theroux

#14. 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.

Alexander Theroux

#15. Pedantry. The delight in living. Brio. The chance to act, to mime, to mock, to mimic.

Alexander Theroux

#16. 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.

Alexander Theroux

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

Alexander Theroux

#18. That night God and Satan fought long hours for his soul. And God conquered. It was only left to be determined which of the two was God.

Alexander Theroux

#19. 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.

Alexander Theroux

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

Alexander Theroux

#21. We are willing to lose ourselves in another as we exchange fates with one whom we love but on whom our heart is nevertheless impaled.

Alexander Theroux

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

Alexander Theroux

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

Alexander Theroux

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

Alexander Theroux

#25. Silence is the unbearable repartee.

Alexander Theroux

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

Alexander Theroux

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

Alexander Theroux

#28. 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.

Alexander Theroux

#29. There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate. It's not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another.

Alexander Theroux

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

Alexander Theroux

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

Alexander Theroux

#32. 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.

Alexander Theroux

#33. I thought ... their elegance ... lies not so much in their
clothes as in their bodies, and their bodies have received it, and continue to unceasingly receive it, from their souls, which are just like yours, lovely Simonetta.

Alexander Theroux

#34. for too easily we come to love love first and not...that from which it comes.

Alexander Theroux

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

Alexander Theroux

#36. The parrot holds its food for prim consumption as daintily as any debutante, [with] a predilection for pot roast, hashed-brown potatoes, duck skin, butter, hoisin sauce, sesame seed oil, bananas and human thumb.

Alexander Theroux