Top 9 Quotes & Sayings by Dennis Cooper

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Dennis Cooper.
Last updated on November 5, 2024.
Dennis Cooper

Dennis Cooper is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist. He is best known for the George Miles Cycle, a series of five semi-autobiographical novels published between 1989 and 2000 and described by Tony O'Neill "as intense a dissection of human relationships and obsession that modern literature has ever attempted." Cooper is the founder and editor of Little Caesar Magazine, a punk zine, that ran between 1976 and 1982.

Why is it I feel a new nostalgia for the era of the guillotine?
I want to love someone so selflessly that he would never even think about going away. I suppose that's what most people want. In fact, that's probably why we don't kill one another all the time. Everyone's just a little too lonely to risk it.
I was thinking a lot about music, about how music is mixed and how everything is happening at the same time; it just amounts to how the sound is lowered or raised. I was trying to get that with writing.
When I read Spencer Madsen’s poetry, I not only feel awe because he’s so good, one of the best, but I also think about how everything in the world is happening at the same time, and how the world we get to know is so heavily edited down. It’s the hugest, weirdest feeling. I wish Spencer Madsen could be everywhere at once. I really love You Can Make Anything Sad.
Before I decided to concentrate on writing, I drew pictures and painted, and made Super 8 experimental movies. I was the singer in three rock bands, and I wrote and staged and acted in plays for kids in my neighborhood. So I was kind of all over the place in my interests and far-flung in terms of where my creativity wanted to end up.
A lot of writers do think of their characters as living beings. I know that's the way people think. That's why I try to make them real in a certain way, because otherwise people won't read them. It's fine if some readers think of them as real. It's just not the way that I think of them.
My novels tend to take a long time to become exactly what they're going to be. They're fluid messes until I've done a ton of editing and refining and rewriting. When I write novels, I always make related scrapbooks to help me organize and test my intentions.
I think pornography is a very rich medium, and I've studied it closely and learned quite a lot as a writer from it. — © Dennis Cooper
I think pornography is a very rich medium, and I've studied it closely and learned quite a lot as a writer from it.
Cult writer. It's a weird term because it's complimentary but condescending at the same time.
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