Quotes from David Leavitt

What's wrong with Barbara Kingsolver?" Eva asked. "She is the embodiment of liberal piety at its most middlebrow and tendentious. Her novels are the beef ribs of fiction.

Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.

When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.

We all spend so much time worrying about the future that the present moment slips right out of our hands. And so all we have left is retrospection and anticipation, retrospection and anticipation. In which case what's left to recall but past anticipation? What's left to anticipate but future retrospection?

Hope had stolen into his life just as he was growing comfortable with despair.

Sex, my darling, is often the least important part of a passion. You'll learn that when you get older. - Maria Luisa (Tushi) Strauss

Cautiously his foot explored, wiggled as it could, and finally felt warm flesh under the pants leg.

Spouse or collaborator, it comes to the same thing. And there is work to be done. Always, always work to be done." -David Leavitt, "Partition," _The Indian Clerk_

She looked toward the window, smiling away her life

I watched that film the other night and it embarrassed me. So dated, so coy, so evasively homosexual only a fellow homosexual might recognize the subtext.

Así que huyes de los causantes de dolor, vas a un sitio nuevo, intentas convencerte de que el viejo sitio no existe, que la distancia borra la historia

Real people have a way of banging against the doors you've closed; they know your name, your phone number. They live with you.

having some warm and fuzzy impulse to make the world a better place isn't enough. It doesn't make you an artist. What's been lost is any appreciation of virtuosity, of flair.

La relación entre Edward y yo fue una historia típica que, atrapada en la guerra, se volvió trágica...pero eso también es una historia típica

L'invisibilità è la qualità fondamentale di un voltapagine: in scena, egli deve cercare di cancellare il più possibile la sua presenza, dando l'impressione che le pagine si voltino da sole. Il voltapagine ha il raro privilegio di sentire un pianista quasi come sente se stesso: sentire il suo canto sommesso, i gemiti che di quando in quando gli sfuggono tra i denti, lo schiocco sordo delle unghie contro i tasti. E non solo sentirlo, ma vederlo; studiarlo.

Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night.

With any luck, that'll be the silver lining of this fucking election, that when writers start to feel oppressed again they'll start to write books worth reading instead of all that idiotic upper-middle-class self-absorbed liberal navel-gazing crap we got when Obama was president.

Non c'è dispiacere più grande che ricordare la gioia passata nell'infelicità. 

Gli argini della memoria» aveva detto Joseph. Che espressione misteriosa, come se la memoria fosse un fiume. Ed era così che Tushi vedeva Joseph adesso: in riva a un fiume, con i pantaloni arrotolati sopra le caviglie e le lunghe gambe che sguazzavano nell'acqua mentre si chinava a setacciare il limo, la sabbia e il fango che erano la sua storia. Cosa avrebbe dragato prima dell'alba? Qualcosa che l'avrebbe aiutato? Tushi lo sperava, ma non ne era sicura. 

Christmas was over. It had passed, as usual, in a fever of generosities, and left an aftertaste of swindle in its wake. "Anticippointment" Pamela said . . . and there was in that invented word all the regret and resignation that forty-seven years of Christmases had built up in her.

Oh, el anhelo payasesco de quienes no han sido amados tal cual son!

Assume makes an ass out of you and me - p.239

Assume makes an ass out of you and me.

Sometimes I think you are doomed to happiness