Wayne Koestenbaum > Quotes

“How frequently do you look in the mirror? Does your face please you? Are you disgusted to detect familial features? Do you worship or hate your ancestors? Do you consider your image erotic? Do you pretend that you are a star's child? If you squint, does your reflection become abstract? Is abstraction a transcendental escape from identity or a psychotic spasm of depersonalization?”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, My 1980s & Other Essays

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

“If you care about words you learn quite early in life that it is evil to lie.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, My 1980s & Other Essays

“Prose divides shame into stations.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, My 1980s & Other Essays

“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, Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality And The Mystery Of Desire

“The poetic line, a grave and timeless portal, requires a very simple password.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, Figure It Out

“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, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“... and I'll hypothesize that, in general, identity germinates from humiliation's soil... Why am I confident that this is true? Do I know what 'identity' is? A molten enterprise, it consists, I suppose, in that bewildering and half-inaudible chorus of inner fantasies and memories that builds the illusory sense of ego... Humiliation isn't merely the basement of a personality, or the scum pile on the stairway down. Humiliation is the earlier event that paves the way for 'self' to know it exists.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation

“Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven't acted on your desires. You've suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You've silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire

“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, Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon

“Yes to fingerfucking the dialectic! Or to using the dialectic as a method of fingerfucking the binary!”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“I seek for myself the immunity of the diplomatic pouch.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, My 1980s & Other Essays

“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, Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality And The Mystery Of Desire

“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, Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality And The Mystery Of Desire

“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

“Later I will systemize my impossible subject, but for the moment I want to enjoy a tentative movement between its different chambers. I am not certain which are important and which are extraneous. Nor am I certain whether this topic is one that I have the strength to pursue.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, Figure It Out

“I demand wisdom from my fingers: at least they must sound human, and not like spoons and forks! The piano, however, is not a human being. It lies halfway between a friend and a rock. More responsive than a rock. More predictable than a friend.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, Figure It Out

“She would tell me parts of her story, but they never added up, and, intoxicated, I probed no further. I was grateful that Moira Orfei was endless, and that she never told me the true story of her difficult life.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, Circus: Or, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes

“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, My 1980s & Other Essays