Quotes from Alexander Theroux

Writing, he'd come to see, was the spiritual disease of which it considered itself to be the cure;

The symbol of art is the tombstone, thought Darconville, an obelisk sticking up out of the earth with the inscription, "I count!

Man loves in order to live in another a life missing in himself, for perhaps love does love what it lacks: we want to be what we love, even if what we love wants us to be, when we love, what we are.

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

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.

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

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.

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.

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

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

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