Gay Talese Quotes & Sayings

I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel. — Gay Talese

In Connecticut the crime of oral sex could be punishable by a thirty-year jail term. In Ohio it was one to twenty years. In Georgia such a "crime against nature" could lead a practitioner to life imprisonment at hard labor- a penalty far more severe than having sex with animals, which in Georgia was punishable by only five years. — Gay Talese

One way to hold a woman is not to hold her. — Gay Talese

In a male-dominated world, Reich suggested, there was an "economic interest" in the continued role of women as "the provider of children for the state" and the performer of household chores without pay. — Gay Talese

Sports is about people who lose and lose and lose. They lose games; then they lose their jobs. It can be very intriguing. — Gay Talese

Most journalists are restless voyeurs who see the warts on the world, the imperfections in people and places ... gloom is their game, the spectacle their passion, normality their nemesis. — Gay Talese

Too many people were obsessed with their heads and were alienated from their bodies, Perls believed, adding: We have to lose our minds and come to our senses. — Gay Talese

Thirteen years I took on this last book. — Gay Talese

I've always had standards about writing well. There is art in this business. There is potentially great art. — Gay Talese

While the quest for adventure that had long plagued him now tempted him to remove his clothes, an even more persuasive force within him prevented him from doing so, mainly because he feared revealing for the first time in front of so many people that unpredictable organ he assumed was everyman's burden- although, as he was apparent from the number of flaccid phalli he saw around him, no man seemed burdened tonight except himself. — Gay Talese

Listen, then make up your own mind. — Gay Talese

He believed that all people existed behind varying layers of armor which, like the archaeological layers of earth itself, reflected the historical events and turbulence of a lifetime. An individual's armor that had been developed to resist pain and rejection might also block a capacity for pleasure and achievement, and feelings too deeply trapped might be released only by acts of self-destruction or harm to others. Reich was convinced that sexual deprivation and frustration motivated much of the world's chaos and warfare. — Gay Talese

People go to restaurants for so many different reasons. To court a girl, to make some deal. Maybe to talk to some lawyer about how to get an alimony settlement better than they got last week. — Gay Talese

It's true what they say - all the good men are married. But it's marriage that makes them good. — Gay Talese

It seemed that the penis per se, except to male homosexuals, was not a very salable commodity in the sexual marketplace of America. Few women could be aroused by the sight of an erect penis unless they were warmly disposed to the man who was attached to it. — Gay Talese

The average married man, if he had the energy, could have sex with several women without diminishing the affection and desire he felt for his wife. But women like Judith- unlike truly liberated females like Barbara and Arlene- could not simply accept a man as a temporary instrument of pleasure; they wanted soft lights and promises, not just a penis but the man attached to it. — Gay Talese

For example, many colleges in their writing programs teach some of my work. — Gay Talese

Charlotte, N.C., 273 Chastity belt, 55 Chaucer, Geoffrey, — Gay Talese

Interestingly, the historic case of 1868 in England that first defined obscenity-known among lawyers as the Hicklin decision- evolved out of the prosecution of a pamphlet describing how priests were often so sexually aroused while hearing women's confessions that they sometimes masturbated and even copulated with their repentant subjects in the confessional. — Gay Talese

With all of the qualities of the scene-setting, the dialogue, the place and time and the time and place in which your characters move. And I want to move with the characters, move with them and describe the world in which they are living. — Gay Talese

News, if unreported, has no impact. It might as well have not happened at all. — Gay Talese

Better that you should take the chance of trying something that is close to your heart, you think is what you want to write, and if they do not publish it, put it in your drawer. But maybe another day will come and you will find a place to put that. — Gay Talese

Whatever influence Bullaro's normally cautious character might have exerted over the passions of his penis were now nonexistent, and he unhesitatingly followed her and quickly undressed. — Gay Talese

Departing from Freud's exclusively verbal analysis, Reich studied the body as well as the mind, and he concluded after years of clinical observation and social work that signs of disturbed behavior could be detected in a patient's musculature, the slope of his posture, the shape of his jaw and mouth, his tight muscles, rigid bones, and other physical traits of a defensive or inhibiting nature. Reich identified this body rigidity as armor. — Gay Talese

Even after they had stopped modeling for Playboy and had settled down with other men to raise families of their own, Hugh Hefner still considered them his women, and in the bound volumes of his magazine he would always possess them. — Gay Talese

Group nudity could also be personally beneficial, according to psychologist Abraham M. Maslow, who believed that nudist camps or parks might be places where people can emerge from hiding behind their clothes and armor, and become more self-accepting, revealing, and honest. — Gay Talese

The Park Avenue of poodles and polished brass; it is cab country, tip-town, glassville, a window-washer's paradise. — Gay Talese

The real problem is what to do with the problem-solvers after the problems are solved. — Gay Talese

Jessica DuLong's elegantly written "My River Chronicles" brings the past of the Hudson River into the vivid present, and carries forward the craft of literary non-fiction with grace and energy. — Gay Talese

I am a documentarian of what I do. — Gay Talese

As the months went by, Talese began to see the masseuse as a kind of unlicensed therapist. Just as thousands of people each day paid psychiatrists money to be heard, the massage man paid money to be touched. — Gay Talese

I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about. — Gay Talese

The penis, often regarded as a weapon, is also a burden, the male curse. — Gay Talese

The real problem is what to do with problem solvers after the problem is solved. — Gay Talese

An individual with genital character, according to Reich, was fully in contact with with his body, his drives, his environment- he possessed "orgastic potency," the capacity to "surrender to the flow of energy in the orgasm without any inhibition ... free of anxiety and unpleasure and unaccompanied by fantasies"; and while genital character alone would not assure enduring contentment, the individual at least would not be blocked or diverted by destructive or irrational emotion or by exaggerated respect for institutions that were not life-enhancing. — Gay Talese

Many male habitues of massage parlors, like Talese, did not like solitary masturbation; in the parlance of the younger generation, it was a "downer." And yet to be masturbated by an appealing masseuse, to be in the physical presence of a woman with whom there was some communication and understanding, if not love, was gratifying and fun. — Gay Talese

Wall Street bankers supposedly back the Yankees; Smith College girls approve of them. God, Brooks Brothers, and United States Steel are believed to be solidly in the Yankees' corner ... The efficiently triumphant Yankee maching is a great institution, but, as they say, who can fall in love with U.S. Steel? — Gay Talese

Journalism is a voyeuristic vocation that attracts to its employment many people who are often naturally shy and insatiably curious, and each day they are assigned to view the world with a critical eye and a detached sense of intimacy. — Gay Talese

The reporter wrote with the hope that he would get a by-line in the Times, a testimony to his being alive on that day and all the tomorrows of microfilm. — Gay Talese

Yes there is a little group of soccer aficionados, but I am not one of them. — Gay Talese

Bullaro blushed. Barbara guided him around the room to meet other people, but all he saw in furtive glances were dangling breasts and hairy chests, bare buttocks and white thighs, pubic hair of various colors, penises that were large and small, circumcised and uncircumcised, and, remarkably, unerect. — Gay Talese

Restaurants are a wonderful escape for me. And are for a lot of people. — Gay Talese

Men admitted to being endlessly fascinated with the naked female form; they appreciated women in a detached, impersonal way that women, even those women who were flattered by such attention, rarely understood. — Gay Talese

While the moral force of Judeo-Christian tradition and the law have sought to purify the penis, and to restrict its seed to the sanctified institution of matrimony, the penis is not by nature a monogamous organ. It knows no moral code. It was designed by nature for waste, it craves variety, and nothing less than castration will eliminate the allure of prostitution, fornication adultery, or pornography. — Gay Talese

People dress up for funerals. Why not dress up to celebrate that you're alive? — Gay Talese

I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work. — Gay Talese

Unlike the millions who casually masturbate in solitude while looking at girlie pictures in Playboy and similar magazines, the massage man preferred an accomplice, an attendant lady of respectable appearance who would help him reduce the guilt and loneliness of this most lonely act of love. — Gay Talese

Frank Sinatra stopped his car. The light was red. Pedestrians passed quickly across his windshield but, as usual, one did not. It was a girl in her twenties. She remained at the curb staring at him. Through the corner of his left eye he could see her, and he knew, because it happens almost every day, that she was thinking, It looks like him, but is it?
Just before the light turned green, Sinatra turned toward her, looked directly into her eyes waiting for the reaction he knew would come. It came and he smiled. She smiled and he was gone. — Gay Talese

In his parochial school, the nuns had advised him and his classmates that they should sleep each night on their backs with their arms crossed on their chests, hands on opposite shoulders- a presumably holy posture that, not incidentally, made masturbation impossible. — Gay Talese

Many couples in the room merely watched the proceedings in wonderment, and to them the visit to Sandstone was a learning experience, a biology class, an opportunity to become increasingly knowledgeable about sex in the way that people traditionally learned about almost everything except sex, through the observation and imitation of other people. — Gay Talese

Putting on a beautifully designed suit elevates my spirit, extols my sense of self, and helps define me as a man to whom details matter. — Gay Talese