Alexander Theroux
Alexander Theroux
Alexander Louis Therouxis an American novelist and poet whose best known novel is perhaps Darconville’s Catwhich was selected by Anthony Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice in 1984 and in Larry McCaffery’s 20th Century’s Greatest Hits He was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 1991 and the Clifton Fadiman Medal for Fiction in 2002 by the Mercantile Library in New York City. He is the brother of novelist Paul Theroux...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
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.
The ears, which master the face of a dunce, are that part of the head which most publishes stupidity.
I kneel to my Lord because I am such a failure. I pray, I hope, I look to the Gospels.
Adultery is the vice of equivocation. It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you've made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors--neutral gray.
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.
Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.
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 inequalities... it was envy that forced them to emulate each other, not esteem.
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.
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 develops and acquires names for color, the colors always enter in the same order. The most primitive are black and white. Then red. Then either green or yellow.
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.