Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" One of the side benefits of staying in the closet is you can have a much bigger career. "

" 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 can think of no other writer who so thoroughly embodies the Jamesian spirit as Alison Lurie. Like him she can excavate all the possibilities of a theme. Like his, her books seem long, unbroken threads, seamless progressions of effects. "

" In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where I fell in love with Marilyn Monroe. I knew that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet she was in pain, in need. She was unhappy. I believed that I could help her. "

Beautiful Woman

" Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction. "

" Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better. "

" It's true that Paris is made up of equal parts of social conservatism and anarchic experimentation, but foreigners never quite know where to place the moral accent mark. "

" I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought. "

" Originally, I was against gay marriage because I was opposed to all marriage, being an old-fashioned gay bohemian. The straight people I knew in the sixties were very much opposed to it. I was, too, and it was never a possibility for gays, but when I saw how opposed the Religious Right was to it, I thought it a fight worth fighting. "

" I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be. "

" Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. "

" The talk shows in the States want celebrities, not authors. In France, it is different; writers are called upon to comment on everything. They have a very public role there. "

" I suppose people hadn't really thought each decade should have its own character and be different from the others till the 1920s, although I remember in a nineteenth-century Russian novel someone remarked that a character was a typical man of the 1830s - progressive and an atheist. "

" I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care later when I write about her. "

" Just like Barack Obama, my views on gay marriage have evolved, and now I am a reluctant groom. "

" 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is a masterpiece because it is an episodic novel that has a rigorous form - an unprecedented combination. From the very beginning we know the town of Macondo will endure only a century, so there is a limit to the length of the narrative. "

" Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory. "

" The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors. "

" The Internet's impact is immense. My students can't imagine ever paying for a book. "

" There is a whole industry in America of people who want to write, and those who teach it. Even if the students don't end up writing, what's good about them taking the courses is, they become great readers, learning to appreciate the writing. "

" In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre. "

" 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. "

" In 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'Jack Holmes and His Friend,' my idea was to take someone totally different from my real self and, at the same time, to assign to him my own life trajectory. "

" The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,' the relatives would ring up in high dudgeon. I once wrote a mocking review of Marguerite Duras in the 'New York Review of Books,' and good friends of mine in France got very angry. "

" My mother was terribly invasive, all in the name of psychiatric honesty. It was a bad thing in some ways, but I do think it had the effect of making me interested in 'the truth' as a writer - more than beauty, more than having a shapely story. "

" Few writers in history have ever been 'politically correct' (a notion that rapidly changes in any case), and there's no reason to imagine that gay writers will ever suit their readers, especially since that readership is splintered into ghettos within ghettos. "

" As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together. "

" Barack Obama's decision to come out in favour of gay marriage may be a historic occasion, but it is not an isolated one. His administration has been making pro-gay noises for some time; his demographic in the upcoming election is young and educated, precisely the group that favours equality for the LGBT community. "

" Looking back, I can see that the women I loved, at least early on, were status symbols. I suppose, in that sense, I was my mother's true disciple. She'd taught me that a good man, though elusive, could transform one's whole life once he was caught. "

" I've always been impelled to say the truth. When I was 14, in 1954, I already wrote a gay novel, though I'd never read one. I felt that life handed me a great subject, gay life, that had scarcely been examined, and I was impelled to record it in all its strange detail. "