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
I kneel to my Lord because I am such a failure. I pray, I hope, I look to the Gospels.
The ears, which master the face of a dunce, are that part of the head which most publishes stupidity.
It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.
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.
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.
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.
Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.
Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?
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.
Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.
There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.
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.
I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason.
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.