Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Hell is God's Absence.
In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts.
I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published.
When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist.
I think I'm very stoic. Death and dying are things that I'm used to.
Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard.
Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.
I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.
I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.
I'd rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots.
I don't have to get married myself in order to campaign on behalf of gay marriage.
The Internet's impact is immense. My students can't imagine ever paying for a book.
It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack.
One of the side benefits of staying in the closet is you can have a much bigger career.
I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer.
These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.
Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets.
In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.
Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better.
Just like Barack Obama, my views on gay marriage have evolved, and now I am a reluctant groom.
I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought.
At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later.
The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.
All his leisure clothes were absurd - jokes, really - as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.
I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out.
The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.
I hate writing. I almost never write. I write against deadlines. And when I'm teaching, I'm focused on that.
I asked my body if it was going to die or not from AIDS. And it said 'no.' I sort of paid attention to that.
I think I could be a cook. Everybody always says I'm good, though I think it's quite gruelling as a profession.
A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.
Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.
The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.
Paris... is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.
AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s.
Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books.
New York has been the subject of thousands of books. Every immigrant group has had its saga as has every epoch and social class.
The natural enmity between leaver and left is like the absolute, immediate and always shifting hostility between driver and pedestrian.
Women and gay men have something in common after all: in that they are trying to deal with this goofy egotistical monster called a man.
Someone once remarked that in adolescence pornography is a substitute for sex, whereas in adulthood sex is a substitute for pornography.
I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.
Ive always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.
When my lover Hubert Sorin was dying of AIDS, he was always trying to fix me up - posthumously, as it were - with the cute busboy at the hotel.
Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.
I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.
The notion that I might have been able to court friends, win attention, conjure it, would have spoiled it for me. Unbidden love was what I wanted.
Sometimes Peggy herself would sell tickets to her museum, and if tourists asked her if Mrs. Guggenheim was still alive, she'd assure them she wasn't.
If I take a less defensive tone, I'd admit that I couldn't write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire.
When we are young... we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now.
Originally I was opposed to gay assimilation and targeted gay marriage as just another effort on the part of gays to resemble their straight neighbours.
I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.