John Horne Burns Quotes & Sayings

[T]he important thing was that each Saturday they must win games and put The Academy on the sporting pages. For that, after all, was the final index to the rating of an American school. — John Horne Burns

To be a good writer, one must be homosexual. — John Horne Burns

It takes time and tiredness and tension to hate a city. — John Horne Burns

They were our enemies. Yet in those young men of Italy I'd seen something centuries old. An American is only as old as his years. A long line of something was hidden behind the bright eyes of those Italians. And then and there I decided to learn something of the modern world. There was something abroad which we Americans couldn't or wouldn't understand. But unless we made some attempt to realize that everyone in the world isn't American, and that not everything American is good, we'll all perish together, and in this twentieth century.... — John Horne Burns

He relished learning from the voice of a teacher and from books. Each day of merely learning something was a deep adventure to him. Sometimes he laughed and told himself that he was unnatural, for American boys are supposed to hate school. They followed a pattern of Redblooded Masculinity, set up by the traditions of hookey and Mark Twain. But he had no resistance whatever to his studies. He took them supine and with gusto, with the receptively of a girl whose desires have been aroused by loving blandishment. — John Horne Burns

She saw why teachers get very old and stay very young. For there is no closer probing of the mind--not even in psychoanalysis. — John Horne Burns

The war had made him into a lone wolf, an introverted arrow that shot silent and solitary to his target for the moment. He'd become an opportunist of sensation and aesthetic. — John Horne Burns