Quotes by Blake Bailey - Page 1 | QuoteForever

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With literary biographies, you're either shelved with other biographies or next to your subject's fiction.
Blake Bailey / Writer
Biographies
Literary
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I write literary biographies, so above all, I have to love the subject's books. But choosing a subject is tough.
Blake Bailey / Writer
Biographies
Choosing
Literary
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The whole psychoanalytical establishment in America at midcentury was geared to make people with homosexual proclivities feel like monsters, moral degenerates.
Blake Bailey / Writer
Establishment
Homosexual
Monsters
Geared
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I'm not an academic; I'm just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they've ever written and find out why they wrote it.
Blake Bailey / Writer
Academic
Passionate
Want
Joe
Suddenly
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I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and thats very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.
Blake Bailey / Writer
Cities
Ethos
Oklahoma City
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I'm a huge fan of 'The Lost Weekend.' I have this dog-eared copy of the 1963 Time Reading Program edition, which was a series of contemporary classics reprinted as a quality paperback.
Blake Bailey / Writer
Contemporary
Program
Classics
Copy
Edition
Huge Fan
Paperback
Time Reading
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I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and that's very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.
Blake Bailey / Writer
Ethos
Middle Class
Oklahoma
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I keep three framed photographs on my desk: the latest school picture of my daughter; a photo of my wife getting her diploma from the University of Chicago; and Lytton Strachey, looking serenely self-possessed.
Blake Bailey / Writer
Chicago
Diploma
Framed
Photo
Desk
Latest
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My father was a golden boy from a very small town. He won a very prestigious law scholarship to NYU Law School, and there in Greenwich Village, he met my mother, who was very young, fresh off the boat from Germany.
Blake Bailey / Writer
Boat
Father
Germany
Golden
Greenwich
Greenwich Village
Law School
Mother
Nyu
Prestigious
Scholarship
School
Small Town
Village
Fresh
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To be a good biographer, you have to be an empiricist. You know, you have to gather the evidence, you have to keep an open mind, and you have to be objective. A memoirist goes in with all the baggage of a bad biographer.
Blake Bailey / Writer
Baggage
Open Mind
Good Mind Keep
Good Mind Bad
Gather
Objective
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A damnably readable, streamlined, yet deeply researched work. Skipping the ancestors and aftermath of conventional biography, Max gives us the man, his work, and his times-the niceties of which (so complicated, so exquisitely intertwined) Max articulates with, well, Wallace-like lucidity and wit. Above all this is the story of a touching young man who insisted on being something better than simply the smartest person in the room.
Blake Bailey / Writer
Men
Giving
Touching
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The funniest novel you've never read. . . . Afternoon Men is a revelation to sophisticated readers of every stripe, but especially to a certain kind of artist manqu on the brink of discovering that life is a more difficult business than he ever had reason to expect. . . . The subject matter is 'relatable,' as my students like to say. Better still, though, is what you can learn about the craft of writing from this marvelous book. . . . Indeed, if you're looking for a funny, nonportentous Hemingway, then the early Powell is your man.
Blake Bailey / Writer
Men
Book
Writing
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