Christopher Bram > Quotes

“We’re happier when the assholes are villains.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“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, The Notorious Dr. August: A Riveting Historical Novel of Ghosts, Love, and a Clairvoyant Pianist

“It has been a marvellous age of invention: radio, aeroplane, electric light, the telephone, and fellatio.”
― Christopher Bram, The Notorious Dr. August: A Riveting Historical Novel of Ghosts, Love, and a Clairvoyant Pianist

“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

“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, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“If oppression produced saints, we’d want everyone to be oppressed.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’: “You were silly like us.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“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, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“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, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“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, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“If the achievement of so much in life could not make one happy, then why bother living?”
― Christopher Bram, Lives of the Circus Animals

“A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Good prose is solitary work.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Death is almost never timely, even for the old.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“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, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“A career in the arts can make anyone crazy.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Art is long and life is short.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“It’s often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they’re going.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“An obsessed reader figured that ‘Armistead Maupin’ was an anagram for ‘is a man I dreamt up’.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“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

“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, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“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, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White’s strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other’s domain.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Vidal himself joked that at a certain age lawsuits took the place of sex.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“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, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America