David Leavitt Quotes

Assume makes an ass out of you and me - p.239 ~ David Leavitt

You could reach for him, and sometimes you would grab hold of him. But sometimes all you would grab hold of was a reflection of a reflection in a revolving door. ~ David Leavitt

Real people have a way of banging against the doors you've closed; they know your name, your phone number. They live with you. ~ David Leavitt

He [Wallace] sent a quick note to his friend [Franzen] explaining his behavior. "the bold fact is that I'm a little afraid of you right now,"[ ... ] "all I can tell you is that I may have been that [a worthy opponent] for you a couple/ three years ago, and maybe 16 months or tow or 5 or 10 years hence, but right now I am a pathetic and very confused man, a failed writer at 28, who is so jealous, so sickly searing envious of you and Vollmann and Mark Leyner and even David Fuckward Leavitt and any young man who is right now producing pages with which he can live and even approving them off some base-clause of conviction about the entrprise's meaning and end that I consider suicide a reasonable- if not at this point a desirable- option with respect to the whole wretched problem. ~ D.T. Max

We all spend so much time worrying about the future that the present moment slips right out of our hands. And so all we have left is retrospection and anticipation, retrospection and anticipation. In which case what's left to recall but past anticipation? What's left to anticipate but future retrospection? ~ David Leavitt

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised. ~ David Leavitt

Cautiously his foot explored, wiggled as it could, and finally felt warm flesh under the pants leg. ~ David Leavitt

The Term Paper Artist' represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts. ~ David Leavitt

'You might think of combinatorics as a machine too', the major says. 'A different sort of machine, though. Have you heard of Babbage's analytic engine? He never built it ... I have an analytic machine of my own-right here.' He taps his own skull. ~ David Leavitt

I think it's very funny that someone would exaggerate to make himself look worse. ~ David Leavitt

Christmas was over. It had passed, as usual, in a fever of generosities, and left an aftertaste of swindle in its wake. "Anticippointment" Pamela said ... and there was in that invented word all the regret and resignation that forty-seven years of Christmases had built up in her. ~ David Leavitt

Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg. ~ David Leavitt

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. ~ Christopher Bram

Spouse or collaborator, it comes to the same thing. And there is work to be done. Always, always work to be done." -David Leavitt, "Partition," _The Indian Clerk_ ~ David Leavitt

To start with, at that time I'd gone to bed with probably three dozen boys, all of them either German or English; never with a woman. Nonetheless -- and incredible thought it may seem -- I still assumed that a day would come when I would fall in love with some lovely, intelligent girl, whom I would marry and who would bear me children. And what of my attraction to men? To tell the truth, I didn't worry much about it. I pretended my homosexuality was a function of my youth, that when I "grew up" it would fall away, like baby teeth, to be replaced by something more mature and permanent. I, after all, was no pansy; the boy in Croydon who hanged himself after his father caught him in makeup and garters, he was a pansy, as was Oscar Wilde, my first-form Latin tutor, Channing's friend Peter Lovesey's brother. Pansies farted differently, and went to pubs where the barstools didn't have seats, and had very little in common with my crowd, by which I meant Higel and Horst and our other homosexual friends, all of whom were aggressively, unreservedly masculine, reveled in all things male, and held no truck with sissies and fairies, the overrefined Rupert Halliwells of the world. To the untrained eye nothing distinguished us from "normal" men.

Though I must confess that by 1936 the majority of my friends had stopped deluding themselves into believing their homosexuality was merely a phase. They claimed, rather, to have sworn off women, by choice. For them, homosexuality was an ~ David Leavitt

When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself. ~ David Leavitt

Everyone had gone to school with someone's brother or known each other up at Cambridge. These were serious young leftist intellectuals, many of them communists devoted to the idea of a classless society, but they were also upper class and English and so almost unconsciously sought out others of their kind and mixed with them, while the working-class youth stood alone just outside the perimeter of this charmed circle, coming as close as he dared, barred from entry by an invisible boundary of accent. ~ David Leavitt

Assume makes an ass out of you and me. ~ David Leavitt

Hope had stolen into his life just as he was growing comfortable with despair. ~ David Leavitt

James O. Incandenza - A Filmography
The following listing is as complete as we can make it. Because the twelve years of Incadenza'a directorial activity also coincided with large shifts in film venue - from public art cinemas, to VCR-capable magnetic recordings, to InterLace TelEntertainment laser dissemination and reviewable storage disk laser cartridges - and because Incadenza's output itself comprises industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic non-commercial, nondramatic ('anti-confluential') noncommercial, nondramatic commercial, and dramatic commercial works, this filmmaker's career presents substantive archival challenges. These challenges are also compounded by the fact that, first, for conceptual reasons, Incadenza eschewed both L. of C. registration and formal dating until the advent of Subsidized Time, secondly, that his output increased steadily until during the last years of his life Incadenza often had several works in production at the same time, thirdly, that his production company was privately owned and underwent at least four different changes of corporate name, and lastly that certain of his high-conceptual projects' agendas required that they be titled and subjected to critique but never filmed, making their status as film subject to controversy. ~ David Foster Wallace

Imagine a husband treating his wife the way many Christians in America treat God. He says he loves her but ignores her for most of their marriage. He isn't devoted to her and doesn't actively pursue her daily - is that really love? Can you really call such a relationship a "marriage"? Technically, yes, but not in any meaningful way. It would be a marriage in name only. The same is true of Christians whose lives are not devoted to their Messiah. ~ David Wilber

As for Tenacious D, of course it could work as a full length movie; all it requires is a great writer and great director with an ability to think outside of conventional film comedy. ~ David Cross

Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and other varieties have anthocyanins that can help reverse some loss of balance and memory associated with aging. ~ David H. Murdock

In a chaotic world, U.S. diplomats will probably have even less contact with the people they need to reach. ~ David Ignatius

All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the story. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Which would prove I'm a monster, Arnie? Sacrificing the people I love for the fight? Or walking away from the fight to save the people i love? ~ David Wong

Mother's casting hungry looks at my exec again," she complained. "Not to worry," her father replied. "She looks a lot, but she's never had any reason to roam." "You're as bad as she is! ~ David Weber

There are many tough conversations, but one of the most difficult is between a parent and an adolescent daughter, partly because as a parent we are almost always attempting to relate to someone who is no longer there. ~ David Whyte

There is nothing truly serious in life. All words sound hollow when one listens to them carefully. ~ Alexandra David-Neel

We are watching very closely to see how the disease associated with bird flu, when it hits humans, is evolving. ~ David Nabarro

It's only a few nutcases who do art for themselves, like Van Gogh. ~ David Bailey

Believers are expected to be involved in what Judaism calls tikkun-ha'olam, repairing the world. Tikkun-ha'olam is deeply embedded in the Jewish ethic; for this reason even secular Jews usually find themselves concerned with bettering society. ~ David H. Stern

The English have a wellspring of comedy that will never be exhausted: the combination of bestial urges and excellent manners. ~ David Edelstein

Everything stops in her and sinks into silence. She drives slowly, foggy pictures painted in her mind. She has to open a window, but how will she withstand the rush of air? She can hardly breathe. She is frozen around a fragment embedded inside her. Only her heart is suddenly full of life, the only part of her that beats in excitement and goes out to Shaul, goes out limping, goes out hunchbacked, with Band-Aids stuck all over it, but goes out. ~ David Grossman

The movie, (X-Men: Days of Future Past), illustrates a spiritual journey that involves going back in time. The Purpose of the journey is to find the core grievance and let it be healed. When the grievance is healed in Forgiveness, all future scenarios of conflict and destruction are also healed. It is not that they have been prevented in time; it is that we have come to the realization that there was no time in which they could have existed. In the Happy Dream, everything is resolved. It becomes harmonious and then disappears.
Wolverine is the agent strong enough to go back through time and ignite the mission of forgiveness. We can think of ourselves this way as well. We can imagine that our future self, or our higher Self, is orchestrating this whole thing for our awakening. We are just perceiving it in time, where we perceive ourselves to be. There is great love and compassion coming from the higher Self, the future self. ~ David Hoffmeister

I once considered suing Farrah Fawcett for invasion of privacy. Hardly a day passed when I didn't see her on a magazine cover, an ad, a poster. She was destroying my life, but now she's OK. ~ David Sedaris

I love Bob Dylan. Who doesn't? He tapped into some kind of vein and it keeps on keeping on. There's nobody like him. He's unique, and just ... way out cool. ~ David Lynch

As an actor, you've worked very hard, and you've been doing this for 20-some years, and William Morris was never interested - or any studio, either - in your company or as an actor, and then 'God's Not Dead' happens, and now everyone calls you. ~ David A.R. White

The modern secular state's capacity for barbarism exceeds any of the evils for which Christendom might justly be indicted, not ~ David Bentley Hart

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary." - Pablo Picasso ~ David Sherwin

To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom ~ David Mitchell

Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you. ~ Henry David Thoreau

It's as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are. ~ David Levithan

I change my mind a lot. I usually don't agree with what I say very much. I'm an awful liar. ~ David Bowie

Platoons and plays and stores and congresses do not end - they simply move on to a different dimension. ~ David Eagleman

'Tampopo's amazing. I think it's an absolutely fantastic movie, but I don't think it captures for me the meaning of food. ~ David Chang

Naturally, the significant results that legitimize a mathematical theory take time to derive, and then even more time to be fully accepted, and of course throughout this time the Insanity-v.-Genius question remains undecided, probably even for the mathematician himself, so that he's developing his theory and cooking his proofs under conditions of enormous personal stress and doubt, and sometimes isn't even vindicated in his own lifetime, etc. ~ David Foster Wallace

In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate. ~ Gregory David Roberts

I would pay to do what I do if I had to. ~ David McCullough