“As I’ve said before, this is all true. Not that I’ve got anything against fiction—which is easily said, because nobody is writing it any more anyway. Nobody—they’re simply writing nonfiction that never happened…

“What a magnificent hotel the [Vienna] Bristol is. Louis Quatorze is supposed to have said—at Versailles—that the mark of a man of quality is his indifference to cold, heat, hunger, and thirst—and, if that weren’t enough to make any man decide to be a woman, one night—with or without love—in the Bristol in Vienna would…

“Of course, reflecting, there has never been anyone on earth as far out as Louis Quatorze, except Mae West, and just as surely as she was never a man, he, somehow… was always a woman.”

 

James McCourt, Time Remaining (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 134, 183.

See: newyorker.com/a-vibrant-elegiac-novel-of-the-aids-pandemic

and: denniscooperblog.com/the-seven-godlike-books-of-james-mccourt

Image credit above: Alfred A. Knopf.

Below: James McCourt. Photograph by Jarry Lang, courtesy of McCourt’s partner Vincent Virga.