Top 23 Blake Bailey Quotes
#2. To be a good biographer, you have to be an empiricist. You know, you have to gather the evidence, you have to keep an open mind, and you have to be objective. A memoirist goes in with all the baggage of a bad biographer.
Blake Bailey
#3. But what ultimately made Yates the scourge of copy editors was his simple aversion to criticism; any emendation in his manuscript, be it a single semicolon, would cause dark alcoholic brooding, which would finally erupt in long, hectoring, semicoherent phone calls.
Blake Bailey
#4. Repeatedly Yates went berserk - raging over grievances old and new, hurling furniture at phantoms out of his past. The nurses who lived upstairs complained about the racket to the landlady, an eccentric woman who adored Yates and did nothing.
Blake Bailey
#5. Not only had Yates continued to grow as a writer in terms of craft, but also philosophically, salvaging from the ruins of his life a greater degree of compassion for suffering humankind.
Blake Bailey
#6. There were other times, fortunately, when he knew better. "All I write about is family," Elizabeth Cox told him. "That's all there is to write about," Yates replied.
Blake Bailey
#7. With literary biographies, you're either shelved with other biographies or next to your subject's fiction.
Blake Bailey
#8. My father was a golden boy from a very small town. He won a very prestigious law scholarship to NYU Law School, and there in Greenwich Village, he met my mother, who was very young, fresh off the boat from Germany.
Blake Bailey
#9. He loved the idea that he was mentally ill," said his daughter Monica, "and hated the idea he was an alcoholic" - that is, bipolar disorder was a bona fide illness, while alcoholism smacked of a shameful personal failing.
Blake Bailey
#10. I write literary biographies, so above all, I have to love the subject's books. But choosing a subject is tough.
Blake Bailey
#11. The whole psychoanalytical establishment in America at midcentury was geared to make people with homosexual proclivities feel like monsters, moral degenerates.
Blake Bailey
#12. In other words Yates had remembered the lesson of his first great master, Fitzgerald - namely, that people rarely say what they mean, and good dialogue is a matter of catching one's characters "in the very act of giving themselves away.
Blake Bailey
#13. When you put a thing on paper, sometimes you discover you already know the answer. Or maybe that there is no answer, which is the same thing.
Blake Bailey
#14. I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and that's very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.
Blake Bailey
#15. I'm a huge fan of 'The Lost Weekend.' I have this dog-eared copy of the 1963 Time Reading Program edition, which was a series of contemporary classics reprinted as a quality paperback.
Blake Bailey
#16. Vevers remarked on what struck them as Yates's peculiar attitude toward women: 'He expected them to drink a lot and be beautiful all the time.
Blake Bailey
#17. That winter he was invited to give a reading at the University of Massachusetts (Boston), but not a single person showed up. He sat in the silent lecture hall while his two sponsors gazed at their watches; finally Yates suggested they adjourn to a bar. He didn't seem particularly surprised.
Blake Bailey
#18. I keep three framed photographs on my desk: the latest school picture of my daughter; a photo of my wife getting her diploma from the University of Chicago; and Lytton Strachey, looking serenely self-possessed.
Blake Bailey
#19. One of the more curious paradoxes of Yates's nature was his almost archaic courtliness toward women on the one hand, and his lifelong tendency to emphasize their physical defects and/or dubious upbringing on the other.
Blake Bailey
#21. The Lost Weekend was the only book, out of five books, that I wrote sober, without stimulus or sedative.
Blake Bailey
#22. I'm not an academic; I'm just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they've ever written and find out why they wrote it.
Blake Bailey
#23. When a child is young," Burck explained one night (perhaps he was relating Hauber's analogy), "you can catch him if he falls. Then he
Blake Bailey
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