Andrew Durbin > Quotes

“Amazing that Americans can obtain so much mass, approximate stuff of two or three people in Beijing.”
― Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes

“Exterior: the jungle. Interior: Dark night of the white man’s soul.”
― Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes

“The clouds in the movies have always seemed more real to me than those on TV. There would be no clouds on Modern Family, that was certain, and I was not sure I could work in a world without clouds.”
― Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes

“Change is imprecise and messy; sometimes the parts we cleave from ourselves obtain meaning we cannot escape,”
― Andrew Durbin, The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek

“I nodded—I liked Tom of Finland, but I’d never thought of his work as utopian, as being part of any utopia I’d wanted to live in, though our differences were plotted so far apart on the timeline that bound us that I conceded that post-Stonewall, post-AIDS-crisis, my position was rather cushy and I could do whatever I wanted and no one cared, it was already on tv and the internet anyway.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“Is it a novel?” “I don’t know. I guess so. Then again no. It’s like an essay that looks like a novel.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“All fiction is about writing.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“We were not so great at what we did—or at least I wasn’t—and I liked it that way: that no one seemed to care about the quality of any of this, any measurable greatness. We were tiny people, but our tininess was at times formidable.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“We knew something about one another, sure, that we belonged to the same tribe, the markings of which were always visible to those who belong, even if they were invisible to outsiders.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“He was a monk in an order of one.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“Most subjects want to shape your view of them, of course.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“The art world is an unregulated economy that borrows from other economies—theory, poetry, and scientific research, in this case—to continually update its relationship to the world and, in acting as a conduit for other (and all) disciplines, strives to become the clearest image of the world in which we may better see ourselves.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“A home is not hard to find if we understand what we’re looking for. Looking is sometimes done with closed eyes.”
― Andrew Durbin, The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek

“The personality is determined by a variety of interventions that enter the head like big symbolic flags in the conquered soil which seldom knows its defeat.”
― Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes

“Crisis gives us shape, the contours of sympathetic form, whether we call it forth or not, whether or not it happened to us as we claim—or remember—it did.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“My book had a shape, an arc—though I was still incapable of describing what that arc plotted or argued for. As a collection of texts, it moved between poetry and fiction, between Los Angeles and New York. The book struggled, self-consciously, with narrative: how to put the things that made up my life, but also the lives of others, into the form of a story.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“The community of Fire Island is such that you take your place in it for granted, trust that no matter what happens or who it happens with, you will find your way back.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“The future is travelling furiously toward you at incredible speed and will beat you to your destination to surprise you by its resemblance to what you have already seen.”
― Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes

“Every science fiction is a reading of the period that produced it.”
― Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes

“I was a writer, after all. Shouldn’t I have a book?”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“On Fire Island, you drifted, floated in a lazy river of other people’s pheromones and bodily fluids, toward whatever house or cock or ass or what, whatever you wanted, that the current brought you to.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“The importance of resolution over craft is one of the most important shifts in art making besides the creation of Photoshop.”
― Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes

“Sometimes I daydream about merging my body with my computer so that I can more fully enter the landscapes of Google Earth, lush surface world without pollution or traffic, planet seen from the vantage point of space and roving surveillance vehicles, a motionless field, magnifying the normal imperfections and irregularities of the earth so that the planet is rendered transparent, misshapen and yet intoxicating in its languishing distinction from the real.”
― Andrew Durbin

“Success didn’t mean much if there was no one to share it with.”
― Andrew Durbin, The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek

“A catastrophe is an opportunity.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“He called me “darling” in that obnoxious way gay men sometimes do.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“I like pros, especially when it comes to tennis and rent boys” — and here I’m really wondering if the pun on prose consolidates Bruce’s feeling toward it versus poetry under the sign of sex, which Bruce sometimes pays for, in order to direct us toward the pleasure of its use-function when monetised, a pleasure seldom associated with poetry, and one that might lead to the company of more pros. He continues: “If I can get a twofer, and the trick looks like Rafael Nadal, I’m in heaven.”
― Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes

“What a story this place will tell,” she said.”
― Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

“Forgoing outright atrocity, of which there is so much—too much—right now, aren’t the ‘life,’‘body,’ and ‘face’ of Michael Jackson in the running for some of the most abstract events of the last century?”
― Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes

“I am thrilled that I can lend him something and never worry about its return since its life in the cloud totally absolves us of all the guilty lender/borrower feeling of when should I ask for it back.”
― Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes