Dennis Cooper > Quotes

“When I started writing
I was a sick teenaged
fuck inside who partly
thought I was the new
Marquis de Sade, a body
doomed to communicate
with Satan who was us-
ing my sickness as his
home away from home,
and there’s your proof.”
― Dennis Cooper

“Why is it I feel a new nostalgia for the era of the guillotine?”
― Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

“Dan thought of love as defined by books, cobwebbed and hidden from view by the past. Too bad a love like that didn't actually exist. In the twentieth century one had to fake it.”
― Dennis Cooper, Closer

“Love: a hybrid emotion made up of various other emotions collaged by some weak individual's mind to try to quell a particular horror that's not been wiped out by more standardized symbols like Christ, etc. Nietzsche, right? Whatever.”
― Dennis Cooper, Try

“I'm a talentless but popular young singer and I have the feeling someone is watching me. I use the term loosely because I have few feelings, and even they're too simple, like primary colors.”
― Dennis Cooper, Closer

“Emotional. Out of his mind grateful. Anything goes. I love you, I love you, I love you.”
― Dennis Cooper, Period

“Human bodies are such garbage bags.”
― Dennis Cooper, Frisk

“I want to love someone so selflessly that he would never even think about going away. I suppose that's what most people want. In fact, that's probably why we don't kill one another all the time. Everyone's just a little too lonely to risk it.”
― Dennis Cooper

“I like flat black. It doesn't try to explain anything, and it's been hip since before I was born, I guess.”
― Dennis Cooper, Closer

“When you see everything you realize nothing means anything.”
― Dennis Cooper, God Jr.

“When a child grows old enough to know J.R.R. Tolkien was just staring at a typewriter, the truth can be a wounding exposé.”
― Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

“Does that convey my trauma? Shall I boringly compare myself to the biblical Egyptian spearmen tripping over themselves in the gushy mud and piles of flopping fish between the Red Sea’s reconvening halves?”
― Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm

“Mira... Tú y yo somos iguales. Lo único es que tú te decoras de forma aterradora por fuera y yo me decoro de forma aterradora por dentro.”
― Dennis Cooper, Guide

“But here I am blocking the view of this simple scene, like a director who accidentally walks in front of his own projector, then stands there, oblivious to the snoring around him.”
― Dennis Cooper, My Mark

“So I thought, you know, Teach me about death, Satan, I don’t care. And it was all about murder, which was great because when you’re not the one getting murdered, murder’s the ultimate interesting thing. I totally agree with that.”
― Dennis Cooper, Ugly Man

“Now I buy prostitutes instead. It's obvious as soon as I undress they'll take no pleasure earning money from me. But they need the money just like I need to rub my husk against them. And I imagine they think that they've tasted worse and have been tasted by worse.

You don't know what it means to feel my chapped, disfigured lips and cock and hands saw away at something so downy. It's inexplicable. That's why it's hard for me to talk about the fact that my disease is so contagious a little peck on the cheek is enough to almost guarantee transmission.

In a few weeks, all the prostitutes I've hired will be the last boys on earth whom anyone would pay. Not long after I'm dead, they'll be dead. Some nights I fantasize about telling them what saints they are, but I don't. Still, there are times when I almost get the feeling they know.”
― Dennis Cooper

“when you see everything, you realize that nothing means anything”
― Dennis Cooper, God Jr.

“When you see everything you realise nothing means anything.”
― Dennis Cooper, God Jr.

“Why do you think UFOs never land? Why don't ghosts just say hello?”
― Dennis Cooper, God Jr.

“Don't stop believing in me, Brian. It was just a bad day.”
― Dennis Cooper, The Sluts

“To you, the fairy tale’s a cheesy medium that builds physically unsound worlds that one eventually outgrows, and to me a fairy tale is city planning.”
― Dennis Cooper, I Wished

“When everyone you know is either very far away from you or hides, you find someone dead to love.”
― Dennis Cooper, I Wished

“I drank his blood, piss, vomit. I shoved one hand down his throat, one hand up his ass and shook hands with myself in the middle of his body, which sounds funny, but it wasn’t.”
― Dennis Cooper, Frisk

“I'm a nice person. I'm just stupid to want people to like me.”
― Dennis Cooper, The Sluts

“That's why I'm happy I'm famous for what I'm so famous for. Being gorgeous, I mean. It helps me believe in myself and not worry that I'm just a bunch of blue tubes inside a skin wrapper, which is what everyone actually is.”
― Dennis Cooper, Closer

“I'm just some fingers resting lightly on a cursor as it slides magically around a kind of Ouija board.”
― Dennis Cooper, God Jr.

“I know why everyone in a false world would think a boy who spent his whole life doing nothing is God. I just don’t know how to give it decent subtitles yet.”
― Dennis Cooper, God Jr.

“Can you be more clear?” No. When I try, my beliefs or desires come out beautiful. They are beautiful to me, but I cannot understand them in that form.”
― Dennis Cooper, Closer

“Still, this particular fantasy nagged him. He'd stroll through the streets, eat, bathe, weed his rose garden, and it would gather strength over his head, an insidious halo, as black as dried blood, glittering with the thunder of snapping bones. It tugged at him like a tornado. He would peer up and see George affixed to its sphere, and the smog made him think of a woodcut he'd seen as a child. It showed every bone in some man's body broken and woven through spokes of a wagon wheel. Hoisted aloft in the Renaissance, they had continued to twirl for Philippe ever since.”
― Dennis Cooper, Closer

“Punk orders us to demystify everything in the world or we'll be doomed to a future so decadent, atomic bombs will seem just one more aftershave lotion and so on. What you seem to like in my drawings is how they reveal the dark underside, or whatever it's called, of people you wouldn't think were particularly screwed up. But you should know the real goal of my work is a Dorian Gray type of thing. I make you look awful, and I start to look really good….”
― Dennis Cooper, Closer