Dale Peck Quotes

#1. People who shop at Barnes and Noble voted Ulysses the best novel of the last century, and who's to tell them different? There was a point when I would have liked to, but apparently that's just because I'm a bitch.

Dale Peck

#2. Most contemporary fiction sucks. It's intellectually dishonest, often morally dishonest. It's cheap and easy. It pretends to be deep but is really quite shallow.

Dale Peck

#3. Because freedom, it turned out, wasn't like a new shoe: you didn't need to break it in. It felt comfortable the first time you tried it on. It wasn't the present that pinched, it was the past.

Dale Peck

#4. Writing fiction is fundamentally an irrational act.

Dale Peck

#5. Sometimes when we think we're protecting ourselves, we're really hurting ourselves. And sometimes the people around us too.

Dale Peck

#6. I'm a novelist. I think fiction is important or I wouldn't be doing it, but most of it's bad.

Dale Peck

#7. Losing my virginity was very boring.

Dale Peck

#8. It's nice to have something you think separates you from the mainstream and gives you perspective on that, but it can become very limiting at the same time if it's something you use to artificially define yourself.

Dale Peck

#9. I always hoped that I would settle down with someone. Marriage, I could really give two shits about, as an institution, but it makes things easier.

Dale Peck

#10. You are -" she stopped fanning long enough to push the glasses up her nose - "Sprout Bradford?"

I thought it was a little pretentious to say "You are Sprout Bradford?" instead of "Are you Sprout Bradford?" so I said, "I are Sprout Bradford!" in my best half-hick, half-retard voice.

Dale Peck

#11. I have a secret. And everyone knows it but me.

Dale Peck

#12. Your past comes with you no matter where you go.

Dale Peck

#13. Don't come to New York until you've finished a book. It's too expensive. You'll never write anything. You'll spend all your time working to pay the rent.

Dale Peck

#14. I hate it when people repeat the last thing that's been said to them because they're too afraid to ask what the other person meant by it. "You want to remember this moment," I said finally, because when it comes right down to it, I'm a coward.

Dale Peck

#15. Art is only great if it's uncodifiable. If art isn't scaring you, if it's not making you upset, then I don't think it's actually doing anything.

Dale Peck

#16. We had the fun of being outlaws. But there's a whole generation now coming up with new gender identities. For this generation of kids who don't think that being gay is anything special, they might be more interesting than any of us.

Dale Peck

#17. Most people who are HIV positive are on drugs and that gets their viral load so low that it's harder to transmit it. Most new infections come from people who don't know they're infected.

Dale Peck

#18. You show me a teenager who doesn't like to be flattered and I'll show you a teenager who's got a steady source of sex.

Dale Peck

#19. Drift House: Susan's response to Queen Octavia's sarcasm in regards to fading memories ... "But we pass our memories on," she insisted. "I mean, from one generation to the next. Parents teach their children. They write things down, tell them stories

Dale Peck

#20. AIDS was one of those diseases that a lot of people tried to claim ownership over, and especially as someone who was, fortunately never HIV positive, I wanted to avoid any appearance of doing that.

Dale Peck

#21. Who cares what the state thinks about your relationship? They're giving you tax breaks and this and that - it's just nonsense. You want to live with somebody, then live with somebody. All that other stuff is just a way for the state monitoring and codifying certain activities and ostracizing others.

Dale Peck

#22. I came out after safe sex was invented and I always practiced safe sex. Except for when I lost my virginity.

Dale Peck

#23. One night I had a dream and woke up and wrote down the dream. That was my first short story. The dream was a kind of fantasy of me getting revenge on my father.

Dale Peck

#24. There's an alchemy that happens during sex that causes 1 + 1 to add up to much more than 2, even as those halves meld in an almost magical way to form a single unit that's more complete than either of them alone.

Dale Peck