Quotes from Alexander Theroux

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Blue-shirt ( Blauserk in Inuktitat, the Inuit language), or Mykla Jokull, now known as Gunnbjorn's Peak (12,500 feet)--the great metaphorical centerpiece in William T. Vollmann's saga-like novel The Ice-Shirt --is the great glacier in Greenland used as a landmark by Erik the Red in sailing west from Snaefellsness.

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.

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

it is called 'camel case' or 'intercapping' -- of writing small letters next to large in the same word, as in such popular significations as iPod, eBay, iTunes, etc. which few would argue is a distinct sign of illiteracy.

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.

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

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.

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.

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...