Wayne Koestenbaum Quotes & Sayings

I am demonstrating to you how tasty I think words are. I'm having sex with words in front of you. I'm playing around with them. I'm getting off. I'm trying to titillate you. There's this magical substance, language, that I'm laying out for you. Then you're going to fondle it. — Wayne Koestenbaum

Prose divides shame into stations. — Wayne Koestenbaum

I seek for myself the immunity of the diplomatic pouch. — Wayne Koestenbaum

I mention Jackie mostly because I want to be assured that I inhabit the same universe as other people; that I am not alone on a distant shore. Jackie glues me to this world - most effectively when I can find a way to mention her name or her attributes, when I can find a pretext, however frail, to introduce her into a conversation, even at the risk of non sequitur, bathos, or incoherence. — Wayne Koestenbaum

The beauty and magnitude of a diva's voice resides, so the iconography suggests, in her deformity. Her voice is beautiful because she herself is not-and her ugliness is interpreted as a sign of moral and social deviance. Reading biographies of divas, I can't ignore the repeated references to physical flaws-for example, Benedetta Pisaroni's "features horribly disfigured by small-pox," prompting spectators to shut their eyes "so as to hear without being condemned to see." Audiences speculated that Maria Malibran was not anatomically a woman, but an androgyne or hermaphrodite-an aberrant physique to match her voice's magic power. — Wayne Koestenbaum

Half the urge to write is the premonition that later the thought I am having might disappear so I had better write it down while I still have the inclination, however overshadowed this desire is by indolence. — Wayne Koestenbaum

Listeners love when opera dethrones or kills language; the regicide, on these occasions, is the revolutionary, pleasure-seeking, penetrated, tickled ear. Opera theory tells us that words master music, but we, in our secret hearts, know music's superiority; and this destruction of language, this reversal of hierarchy, makes opera a fit object for the enthusiasms of sex-and-gender dissidents. — Wayne Koestenbaum

The world was doing its best to ignore the fact that I was a writer. — Wayne Koestenbaum

The solitary operatic feast, the banquet for one, onanism through the ear: taking an evening out of my life to listen to Simon Boccanegra, I feel I am locked in the bathroom eating a quart of ice cream, that I have lost all my friends, that I am committing some violently antisocial act, like wearing lipstick to school. — Wayne Koestenbaum

Yes to fingerfucking the dialectic! Or to using the dialectic as a method of fingerfucking the binary! — Wayne Koestenbaum

I was not thinking about the world. I was not thinking about history. I was thinking about my body's small, precise, limited, hungry movement forward into the future that seemed at every instant on the verge of being shut down. — Wayne Koestenbaum