Quotes from Christopher Bram

Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.

I learned years ago that love could be temporary and still be love.

There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.

It's often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they're going.

A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.

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.

Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.

A disproportionate number of stories are love stories – and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?

A writer's unconscious is difficult to read, but the imagination is rooted in the unconscious.

The orgy room at Dave's Baths was democracy made flesh; race and social standing were checked at the door along with clothes.

Ginsberg was the favourite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out.

Isherwood received bags of fan mail, far more than Tennessee Williams had for Memoirs . There was the sexual and jokey (a fifteen-year-old English schoolboy sent his photo and wrote on the back, "My tits are on fire").

Sociologists say a neighbourhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual.

Everybody is Other in Maupin.

In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.

Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).

Didn't he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?

Gay liberation did not create gay promiscuity. There was sex before there were marches, politics, or books – it was the best reason for being homosexual, it and love.

It made him feel like a mom, ineffectual and sexless.

I hate hating myself. It's boring. But there's nobody else to hate.

She was sitting up. She lifted and pulled at her blankets, but it was gone. The hippopotamus of wisdom was nowhere in sight.

He looked as incongruous as a rose in a bowl of brussels sprouts.

Throwing himself a party was like rubbing his nose in his failure to connect with people.

Not until she stood at her sink, splashing cold water on her face, did she remember her little hippo. What the hell was that about? When did her unconscious get so fucking whimsical? And what fine truth was he going to tell her?