David Leavitt Quotes & Sayings

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. — David Leavitt

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

The Term Paper Artist' represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts. — David Leavitt

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised. — David Leavitt

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. — David Leavitt

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel. — David Leavitt

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

Assume makes an ass out of you and me. — David Leavitt

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients. — David Leavitt

Having reached a point in which I was so bitter and exhausted from being a quote unquote public figure, I wanted to return to a more childlike relationship to writing. — David Leavitt

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_ — David Leavitt

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

I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good. — David Leavitt

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

You could reach for him, and sometimes you would grab hold of him. But sometimes all you would grab hold of was a reflection of a reflection in a revolving door. — David Leavitt

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. — David Leavitt

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? — David Leavitt

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

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

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can. — David Leavitt

'You might think of combinatorics as a machine too', the major says. 'A different sort of machine, though. Have you heard of Babbage's analytic engine? He never built it ... I have an analytic machine of my own-right here.' He taps his own skull. — David Leavitt

Everyone had gone to school with someone's brother or known each other up at Cambridge. These were serious young leftist intellectuals, many of them communists devoted to the idea of a classless society, but they were also upper class and English and so almost unconsciously sought out others of their kind and mixed with them, while the working-class youth stood alone just outside the perimeter of this charmed circle, coming as close as he dared, barred from entry by an invisible boundary of accent. — David Leavitt

They were good parents. The worst thing they ever did to us was die. — David Leavitt

You are not supposed to get it. It's a paradox. All of mathematics is built on paradoxes. That's the biggest paradox of all-all this orderliness, and at the heart, impossibility. Contradiction. Heaven built on the foundations of hell. — David Leavitt

I think it's very funny that someone would exaggerate to make himself look worse. — David Leavitt

Childhood smells of perfume and brownies. — David Leavitt