Christopher Bram Quotes

There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.

A work of art doesn't need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become involved in other people's lives.

Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don't understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal.

He swings the knocker against the door. The entire building booms like a drum. It continues booming after he lets go, banging like a clock striking the hour, rattling like a great tin drum.

Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White's strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other's domain.

Ginsberg was the favourite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out.

It's often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they're going.

Sociologists say a neighbourhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual.

He looked as incongruous as a rose in a bowl of brussels sprouts.

It has been a marvellous age of invention: radio, aeroplane, electric light, the telephone, and fellatio.

It made him feel like a mom, ineffectual and sexless.

Good prose is solitary work.

I hate hating myself. It's boring. But there's nobody else to hate.

An obsessed reader figured that 'Armistead Maupin' was an anagram for 'is a man I dreamt up'.

A career in the arts can make anyone crazy.

The only truth left is my drunkenness, my sex, and my art.

Being a Boy Scout saved my life. I was a bookish, introverted kid, shy and withdrawn, unhappy and easily bullied. I was also gay, although I didn't know it yet. I should've been miserable. But being a scout got me out of myself and into the world.

Vidal himself joked that at a certain age lawsuits took the place of sex.

The orgy room at Dave's Baths was democracy made flesh; race and social standing were checked at the door along with clothes.

A disproportionate number of stories are love stories – and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?

A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having "such a representative life". And it's true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.

Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.

She was sitting up. She lifted and pulled at her blankets, but it was gone. The hippopotamus of wisdom was nowhere in sight.

The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.

I learned years ago that love could be temporary and still be love.

We all perform balancing acts between self and family, individual and community, private desire and group expectation. Gay people in particular must break with the groupthink of church and society in order to live their own lives. (It's why you still see half-read copies of Atlas Shrugged on the night tables of otherwise intelligent gay men.)

Death is almost never timely, even for the old.

A writer who can't use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.

Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.

Everybody is Other in Maupin.

Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.

Trust the tale, not the teller.

Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in 'In Memory of WB Yeats': "You were silly like us.

Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).

But that was something, wasn't it? It was good to be needed. It was better than being alone. It even felt good to be used. Being used brought you deep inside the machinery of the world.

We're happier when the assholes are villains.

Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.

Political activists rarely like fiction of any kind. Literature is about ambiguity, mixed emotions, and guilty pleasures. Politics is about ideals and action.

If the achievement of so much in life could not make one happy, then why bother living?

Seventies macho was both a look – moustache, jeans, leather jacket – and an attitude – cool, heartless, virile – that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much emotion.

Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.

Cunningham himself said in an interview in Poz that he couldn't help noticing that as soon as he wrote a novel without a blowjob, they gave him the Pulitzer Prize.