Best 17 quotes of David Leavitt on MyQuotes

David Leavitt

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    Having reached a point in which I was so bitter and exhausted from being a quote unquote public figure, I wanted to return to a more childlike relationship to writing.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    I think it's very funny that someone would exaggerate to make himself look worse.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    We all spend so much time worrying about the future that the present moment slips right out of our hands. And so all we have left is retrospection and anticipation, retrospection and anticipation. In which case what's left to recall but past anticipation? What's left to anticipate but future retrospection?

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    You are not supposed to get it. It's a paradox. All of mathematics is built on paradoxes. That's the biggest paradox of all-all this orderliness, and at the heart, impossibility. Contradiction. Heaven built on the foundations of hell.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    'You might think of combinatorics as a machine too', the major says. 'A different sort of machine, though. Have you heard of Babbage's analytic engine? He never built it. ... I have an analytic machine of my own-right here.' He taps his own skull.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    Assume makes an ass out of you and me.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    Everyone had gone to school with someone’s brother or known each other up at Cambridge. These were serious young leftist intellectuals, many of them communists devoted to the idea of a classless society, but they were also upper class and English and so almost unconsciously sought out others of their kind and mixed with them, while the working-class youth stood alone just outside the perimeter of this charmed circle, coming as close as he dared, barred from entry by an invisible boundary of accent.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    I watched that film the other night and it embarrassed me. So dated, so coy, so evasively homosexual only a fellow homosexual might recognize the subtext.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    Real people have a way of banging against the doors you've closed; they know your name, your phone number. They live with you.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    To start with, at that time I'd gone to bed with probably three dozen boys, all of them either German or English; never with a woman. Nonetheless -- and incredible thought it may seem -- I still assumed that a day would come when I would fall in love with some lovely, intelligent girl, whom I would marry and who would bear me children. And what of my attraction to men? To tell the truth, I didn't worry much about it. I pretended my homosexuality was a function of my youth, that when I "grew up" it would fall away, like baby teeth, to be replaced by something more mature and permanent. I, after all, was no pansy; the boy in Croydon who hanged himself after his father caught him in makeup and garters, he was a pansy, as was Oscar Wilde, my first-form Latin tutor, Channing's friend Peter Lovesey's brother. Pansies farted differently, and went to pubs where the barstools didn't have seats, and had very little in common with my crowd, by which I meant Higel and Horst and our other homosexual friends, all of whom were aggressively, unreservedly masculine, reveled in all things male, and held no truck with sissies and fairies, the overrefined Rupert Halliwells of the world. To the untrained eye nothing distinguished us from "normal" men. Though I must confess that by 1936 the majority of my friends had stopped deluding themselves into believing their homosexuality was merely a phase. They claimed, rather, to have sworn off women, by choice. For them, homosexuality was an act of rebellion, a way of flouting the rigid mores of Edwardian England, but they were also fundamentally misogynists who would have much preferred living in a world devoid of things feminine, where men bred parthenogenically. Women, according to these friends, were the “class enemy” in a sexual revolution. Infuriated by our indifference to them (and to the natural order), they schemed to trap and convert us*, thus foiling the challenge we presented to the invincible heterosexual bond. Such thinking excited me - anything smacking of rebellion did - but it also frightened me. It seemed to me then that my friends’ misogyny blinded them to the fact that heterosexual men, not women, had been up until now, and would probably always be, their most relentless enemies. My friends didn’t like women, however, and therefore couldn’t acknowledge that women might be truer comrades to us than the John Northrops whose approval we so desperately craved. So I refused to make the same choice they did, although, crucially, I still believed it was a choice.

  • By Anonym
    David Leavitt

    When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.