Quotes from Christopher Bram

A writer who can't use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.

Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White's strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other's domain.

A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having "such a representative life". And it's true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.

Seventies macho was both a look – moustache, jeans, leather jacket – and an attitude – cool, heartless, virile – that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much emotion.

Vidal himself joked that at a certain age lawsuits took the place of sex.

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 obvious now, so banal.

Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.

Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.

Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn't worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college boys.

An obsessed reader figured that 'Armistead Maupin' was an anagram for 'is a man I dreamt up'.

Trust the tale, not the teller.

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