Quote

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.

Alexander Theroux

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Alexander Theroux
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: August 17
Novelist
Poet
Medford
Massachusetts
Alexander Louis Theroux
Kick
Cervantes
Faces
Kicks
Bookshelf
Fact
Hide
Burton
Facts
Danger
Bookshelves
Cannot
Behinds
Joyce
Find
Friend
Curtain
Firsts
Behind
Punch
First
Curtains
Rabelais
Hard
Face

More quotes by Alexander Theroux

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September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.
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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.
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There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.
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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.
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Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?
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Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.
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The ears, which master the face of a dunce, are that part of the head which most publishes stupidity.
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The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.
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Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.
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Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.
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Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.
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A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion.
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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 you read it.
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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.
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Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.
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It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.
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Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Alexander Theroux