Quotes from Christopher Bram

But that was something, wasn't it? It was good to be needed. It was better than being alone. It even felt good to be used. Being used brought you deep inside the machinery of the world.

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 saque de esta vida sin porvenir y que justifique su existencia. Entonces sí podría dormir plácidamente sobre sus laureles, o sobre sus espinas, sabiendo que ha vivido.

Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.

the only truth left is my drunkenness, my sex, and my art.

Cunningham himself said in an interview in Poz that he couldn't help noticing that as soon as he wrote a novel without a blowjob, they gave him the Pulitzer Prize.

We're happier when the assholes are villains.

People assume that artists must talk about art and beauty and the sublime whenever we get together, but no, we usually talk about money.

It has been a marvellous age of invention: radio, aeroplane, electric light, the telephone, and fellatio.

The fact of the matter is that readers and audiences are never blank slates: individuals see in a work whatever they need to see at that moment.

He swings the knocker against the door. The entire building booms like a drum. It continues booming after he lets go, banging like a clock striking the hour, rattling like a great tin drum.

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 in a newspaper is not always more important than a fictional one in a novel or play or poem.

Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in 'In Memory of WB Yeats': "You were silly like us.

Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.

Political activists rarely like fiction of any kind. Literature is about ambiguity, mixed emotions, and guilty pleasures. Politics is about ideals and action.

If oppression produced saints, we'd want everyone to be oppressed.

Good prose is solitary work.

Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.

Death is almost never timely, even for the old.

Art is long and life is short.

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 order to live their own lives. (It's why you still see half-read copies of Atlas Shrugged on the night tables of otherwise intelligent gay men.)

A work of art doesn't need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become involved in other people's lives.

If the achievement of so much in life could not make one happy, then why bother living?

The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.

A career in the arts can make anyone crazy.