Christopher Bram Quotes & Sayings

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. — Christopher Bram

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. — Christopher Bram

Everybody is Other in Maupin. — Christopher Bram

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

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

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

We're happier when the assholes are villains. — Christopher Bram

A career in the arts can make anyone crazy. — Christopher Bram

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. — Christopher Bram

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

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? — Christopher Bram

Being a Boy Scout saved my life. I was a bookish, introverted kid, shy and withdrawn, unhappy and easily bullied. I was also gay, although I didn't know it yet. I should've been miserable. But being a scout got me out of myself and into the world. — Christopher Bram

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

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

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

Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock). — Christopher Bram

The only truth left is my drunkenness, my sex, and my art. — Christopher Bram

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. — Christopher Bram

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gay revolution began as a literary revolution. — Christopher Bram

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. — Christopher Bram

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.) — Christopher Bram

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

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

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. — Christopher Bram

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

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. — Christopher Bram

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

Good prose is solitary work. — Christopher Bram

Death is almost never timely, even for the old. — Christopher Bram

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

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

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. — Christopher Bram

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

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"). — Christopher Bram

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

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

Art is long and life is short. — Christopher Bram

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

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. — Christopher Bram

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

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. — Christopher Bram

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

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

Trust the tale, not the teller. — Christopher Bram

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