Quotes from Perry Brass

Be reckless in your intensities.

Clothes do not make the man; friends and engagement with life do.

Contrary to a great number of priests and other godly types, queer does not mean castrated.

Don't waste your love on stupid people. Anyone stupid enough to deny or reject it—in the midst of the Love Depression we're in—does not deserve it.

Falling in love with another man is like falling into a vast vat of yourself. For some men this is ultimately nourishing, for others . . . it is drowning.

Fashion is the art of making the unimportant indispensable.

Gays feel about popularity the same way teenage girls do. Is it that we really want friends we can count on, or do we just want guys around us whom we can share our curlers with?

Get out of your house in the middle of a rainstorm, get soaked in it, and then strip down—to nothing but a smile.

Have hot, wild sex with a friend. Then go out and do something stupid, like bowl, afterwards.

Hold the door for an old man. Old ladies can take care of themselves; they've been doing it long enough.

Learn the absolute pleasure of kindness.

Learn to detest things that do not allow you to be yourself, and embrace things that make that self larger, more thrilling, and voluptuous.

Learn to revel in the unalloyed loveliness of receiving attention—to do this, you may have to leave your computer keyboard and invite it.

Most kids are never told about one of life's most effective weapons: when to get pissed as hell. Show it. And then mean it.

One of the problems with technology is that no photograph, as superb and outstanding as it may be, will ever be as satisfying as the most middle-rate painting.

Oscar Wilde said that the gods punish us in two ways: first, they don't give us what we want, then, they do. He forgot the third way: we finally see the cost of getting it.

Perhaps success should not mean that you have nothing to say to anyone, no time for anybody, and not a moment left in your calendar for someone whom you might suddenly realize you love.

Realize that the banality around us that passes as "hipness" or "mass culture" is as satisfying as "mass food"—only it comes in much more unappetizing portions.

Realize the complicated specials of what we call the "inferiority complex." In other words, what, Miss Thing, is so damn special about you to make you feel so specially inferior to any other jerk?

Remember that that "rude awakening" which your parents and well-meaning relatives threatened you with as a kid is better than no awakening at all.

Retailing is the art of selling something that is not necessary to people who are. Anyone who does not understand this sooner, rather than later, goes out of business.

Sports (and the often barely withheld violence around them) have become one of the few modern ways to connect with strangers. They give an amazing number of geeks things to talk about. In the old days we settled for, "Hello, how are you?"

Start a conversation with someone with whom you have "nothing in common" and no possibility of scoring with, networking with, or even seeing again. In other words, a conversation just for the civilized hell of it.

Stay up and listen to lightening. If there is no lightening around, stay up and listen to nothing. Just listen to the sheer joy of your thoughts trans-versing from one corner of your brain to the next.