Alexander Theroux Quotes

21 quotes in 347 categories

• 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,…
• It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.
• Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in Basic Color Terms demonstrate exhaustively and empirically, the very simple thesis that anywhere in the world, as a language…
• Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.
• Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?
• There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.
• Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.
• 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…
• Why should a blacksmith put his hands in the fire if he has tongs?
• 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.
• 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…
• Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.
• A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion.
• Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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 man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.

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