Words! They seemed his only experience, his only sophistications. And yet what were they? Merciless little creatures, crowding about and eager for command, each with its own physical character, an ancestry, an expectation of life and a hope of posterity.

— Alexander Theroux

Alexander Theroux Quotes

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

— Alexander Theroux

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

— Alexander Theroux

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

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

— Alexander Theroux

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

— Alexander Theroux

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

— Alexander Theroux

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

— Alexander Theroux

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

— Alexander Theroux

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

— Alexander Theroux

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

— Alexander Theroux

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

— Alexander Theroux

Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.

— Alexander Theroux

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

— Alexander Theroux

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

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

— Alexander Theroux

Words! They seemed his only experience, his only sophistications. And yet what were they? Merciless little creatures, crowding about and eager for command, each with its own physical character, an ancestry, an expectation of life and a hope of posterity.

— Alexander Theroux

There were words on our lips that in our loneliness alone wanted utterance, and the need by itself virtually created the feeling.

— Alexander Theroux

I’ve always admired stylists. I put the writers of bumphable, ready-to-wear prose, calculated to sell, guaranteed not to shock, in the same category as artists who can’t draw. There is a lack of bravery and a lot of fraud in them. I have tried never to write a book that didn’t attempt something new in the way of narrative technique. Writing is an assault on cliche. I find little to admire in writers who make no attempt at originality.

— Alexander Theroux

Art creates the Eden where Adam and Eve eat the serpent.

— Alexander Theroux

Darconville drew it all out to this paradox, that on the one hand there are temporary beings whom we love but are ever changing, and beyond them there is the eternal object of love itself which is incorruptible, permanent, and ideal. And yet it is not only through the former that we can take cognizance of the latter, we would, without the former, actually have no idea of the latter, the imperfect relative giving us our only idea of the perfect absolute...

— Alexander Theroux
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