It’s often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they’re going.
Art is long and life is short.
Quiere vivir algo que se parezca a una experiencia extraordinaria, una batalla, una historia de amor, una aventura límite, un crimen incluso. Cielo o infierno, qué importa, pero un gran drama que lo s...
Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.
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...
If oppression produced saints, we’d want everyone to be oppressed.
History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about...
Shake
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...
Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.
Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.
If the achievement of so much in life could not make one happy, then why bother living?
A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.
It has been a marvellous age of invention: radio, aeroplane, electric light, the telephone, and fellatio.
In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.
A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.
The only truth left is my drunkenness, my sex, and my art.
He looked as incongruous as a rose in a bowl of brussels sprouts.
The closest he comes to explaining why he found it gay is to say that like Virginia Woolf, it showed a woman defeating a man. Presumably a straight man could never imagine such a thing.
Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.