Christopher Bram

Art is long and life is short.

Ginsberg was the favourite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out.

Trust the tale, not the teller.

A disproportionate number of stories are love stories _ and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?

A writer who can__ use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.

In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.

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.

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.

Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don__ understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal.

Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.

A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having __uch a representative life_. And it__ true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.

There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.

If the achievement of so much in life could not make one happy, then why bother living?

Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.

If oppression produced saints, we__ want everyone to be oppressed.

A career in the arts can make anyone crazy.

Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.

It has been a marvellous age of invention: radio, aeroplane, electric light, the telephone, and fellatio.