16 Quotes by Wayne Koestenbaum

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?

The poetic line, a grave and timeless portal, requires a very simple password.

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.

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.

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.

Prose divides shame into stations.

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.

Yes to fingerfucking the dialectic! Or to using the dialectic as a method of fingerfucking the binary!

I seek for myself the immunity of the diplomatic pouch.