“During the ’50s, when little or nothing honest about gay male and lesbian lives was available culturally, how could a truth teller grab a niche? Not through high culture”

“It is a witty pleasure to read a frontier tale where the explorers, the pathfinders, the hunters, the new builders are there, but metaphorically — as gay women!”

“As glam rock waned and disco had yet to wax, punk style provided the perfect cultural jolt, a new kind of 'No!' that brought together fashion, music, press, and politics to tell the world a story En­gland still can't be too eager to bear”

Portrait of a New York intellectual

“Kerouac and Mailer have long been literary brothers, even if under each other’s skin. Which one founded the Beat Generation and which one merely found it is just a matter of semantics”

“Woodward is hardly trying to cripple a presiden­cy. (He's already done that, right?) But like his fellow perma­nent Washingtonians, he thinks it only fitting to put Clinton in his place.”

“Dear reader, we begin a collaboration, which may go on for three weeks, three months, or, Lord forbid, for three-and-thirty years. I have only one prayer — that I weary of you before you tire of me”

“In America, poetic truths have real-life con­sequences, and Mailer is one of the few American intellectuals to perceive this fact as both fundamental and fundamentally good”

“Despite his penetration of the nation­al psyche, and his status as more or less the George Washington of American letters, the respect Cooper has received at home has rarely been more than grudging”

“Most vampire tales I’ve read lately read like little Kinsey reports, full of tasty trivia about vam­pire life, a subject that used to be shrouded in mystery and fear, like sex. Are you ready to open the forbidden curtain?”