ALEXANDER THEROUX

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

Silence is the unbearable repartee.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.

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.

New Hampshire has always been cheap, mean, rural, small-minded, and reactionary. It's one of the few states in the nation with neither a sales tax nor an income tax. Social services are totally inadequate there, it ranks at the bottom in state aid to education--the state is literally shaped like a dunce cap--and its medical assistance program is virtually nonexistent. Expecting aid for the poor there is like looking for an egg under a basilisk.... The state encourages skinflints, cheapskates, shutwallets, and pinched little joykillers who move there as a tax refuge to save money.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.