Top 100 Edmund White Quotes
#1. In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon.
Edmund White
#2. New York has been the subject of thousands of books. Every immigrant group has had its saga as has every epoch and social class.
Edmund White
#3. Being up on something is a way of dismissing it. To espouse any point of view is a danger - it might leave us stuck with last year's cause. Prized for their novelty alone, ideas, gimmicks, trends become equivalent, interchangeable.
Edmund White
#4. My mother was terribly invasive, all in the name of psychiatric honesty. It was a bad thing in some ways, but I do think it had the effect of making me interested in 'the truth' as a writer - more than beauty, more than having a shapely story.
Edmund White
#5. They all said the way to a man's heart was through his asshole.
Edmund White
#6. Tennessee Williams recognized that great theater begins with great talkers, and that great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else and they never say anything directly.
Edmund White
#7. For these people religion is the only form of intellectuality.
Edmund White
#8. Americans consider the sidewalk an anonymous backstage space, whereas for the French it is the stage itself.
Edmund White
#9. Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better.
Edmund White
#10. I can think of no other writer who so thoroughly embodies the Jamesian spirit as Alison Lurie. Like him she can excavate all the possibilities of a theme. Like his, her books seem long, unbroken threads, seamless progressions of effects.
Edmund White
#11. Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They've already lived their lives.
Edmund White
#12. Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.
Edmund White
#13. Is that how you stay so fresh and young, drinking the sperm of teenage males?
Edmund White
#14. Don't let him lead you astray, my child. He's such a wicked man, woof!
Edmund White
#15. There is an enormous pressure placed on gay novelists because they are the only spokespeople. The novelist's first obligation is to be true to his own vision, not to be some sort of common denominator or public relations man to all gay people.
Edmund White
#16. A middle-aged man who's probably down to jerking off every other day. A weary man of forty who's already seen everything come around twice, who let me fuck him that once in a hole where whole armies of men have doubtless passed.
Edmund White
#17. I've always been impelled to say the truth. When I was 14, in 1954, I already wrote a gay novel, though I'd never read one. I felt that life handed me a great subject, gay life, that had scarcely been examined, and I was impelled to record it in all its strange detail.
Edmund White
#18. Paris ... is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.
Edmund White
#19. His ribs were as visible as hands around a cup.
Edmund White
#20. I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.
Edmund White
#21. It's true that Paris is made up of equal parts of social conservatism and anarchic experimentation, but foreigners never quite know where to place the moral accent mark.
Edmund White
#22. I think I'm very stoic. Death and dying are things that I'm used to.
Edmund White
#23. When a woman falls in love with me, I feel guilty. I am convinced that it's pure obstinacy that keeps me from reciprocating her passion. As I explain to her that I'm gay, it sounds, even to me, like a silly excuse; I scarcely believe it myself.
Edmund White
#24. I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care later when I write about her.
Edmund White
#25. I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.
Edmund White
#26. 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is a masterpiece because it is an episodic novel that has a rigorous form - an unprecedented combination. From the very beginning we know the town of Macondo will endure only a century, so there is a limit to the length of the narrative.
Edmund White
#27. Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and intermittently self-hating, very hip, rebellious. Figuring her out is a gripping adventure.
Edmund White
#28. I'd rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots.
Edmund White
#30. Perhaps we'd understood each other too well to be attracted to one another. There were no occlusions in communication, those breaks in understanding that awaken desire.
Edmund White
#31. I asked my body if it was going to die or not from AIDS. And it said 'no.' I sort of paid attention to that.
Edmund White
#32. When I was living in Paris in the '80s, I used to go out with an American model who couldn't speak French. But suddenly everyone could speak English because he was so cute.
Edmund White
#33. The natural enmity between leaver and left is like the absolute, immediate and always shifting hostility between driver and pedestrian.
Edmund White
#34. Had he already inspired a passion in some stranger's heart?
Edmund White
#35. When I was a child, I loved 'The Marble Faun' by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The reason I liked it was because it had a beautiful binding. When you're a kid, you like books because they're pretty to look at, and this one had a white calfskin cover and gold edges. That was enough to make me love it.
Edmund White
#36. Looking back, I can see that the women I loved, at least early on, were status symbols. I suppose, in that sense, I was my mother's true disciple. She'd taught me that a good man, though elusive, could transform one's whole life once he was caught.
Edmund White
#37. America thrives on identity politics, left and right. But France is opposed to the idea. Since the Revolution, the French have enthroned the idea of universalism. All of us must be equal before the law as abstract individuals, and that extends to the arts.
Edmund White
#38. What is new about Barthes's posthumous reputation is the view of him as a writer whose books of criticism and personal musings must be admired as serious and beautiful works of the imagination.
Edmund White
#39. There are a lot of historical novelists who do the research about the clothes and maybe even the eating utensils, but they're basically taking modern people and putting them in old drag - it's sort of the 'Gone With the Wind' approach.
Edmund White
#40. I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer.
Edmund White
#41. We were losers who talked a winning game. No wonder honesty came to mean for my sister saying only the most damaging things against herself. If she began by admitting defeat, then something was possible: sincerity, perhaps, or at least the avoidance of appearing ludicrous.
Edmund White
#42. I've accompanied several dying people on their travels, and the desert seems to be a favored destination. It is very hot and dry and lyrical in its own way.
Edmund White
#43. I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.
Edmund White
#44. Stendhal had said a Frenchman was an Italian in a bad mood.
Edmund White
#45. Dreadful is a poignant biography of a forgotten man who drank himself to death. It's a brilliant evocation of a self-hating gay novelist in the 1940s whom Gore Vidal once considered a rival.
Edmund White
#46. When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist.
Edmund White
#47. 'The Truth About Lorin Jones' will undoubtedly shock and offend as many readers as it will amuse, since it dares to make fun of feminism - of its manners, if not its politics.
Edmund White
#48. Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters' moral flaws. They apply to these fictional beings standards that no one they know in real life could possibly meet.
Edmund White
#49. While writing 'City Boy,' I relied mainly on my own memories. In particular, I was able to describe the effect of gay liberation on an individual life (mine) as events paralleled my own growing self-acceptance; in this case, the political truly was the personal.
Edmund White
#50. I didn't get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I'd written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful.
Edmund White
#51. Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets.
Edmund White
#52. I always feel I'm better known in England than I am here in the U.S. Americans don't read that much, and the French are very good at knowing the names of everybody.
Edmund White
#53. Sex now seemed a strange thing to me, a social rite that registered, even brought about shifts in the balance of power, but something that was more discussed than performed, a simple emission of fluid that somehow generated religious, social and economic consequences.
Edmund White
#54. The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.
Edmund White
#55. The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.
Edmund White
#56. I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit.
Edmund White
#57. In 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'Jack Holmes and His Friend,' my idea was to take someone totally different from my real self and, at the same time, to assign to him my own life trajectory.
Edmund White
#58. The school was nothing but reminiscence - of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.
Edmund White
#59. Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the stage that they use constantly in conversation, in the same way we may look to written language as an idealization rather than a reflection of ourselves.
Edmund White
#60. What if I can't get it up?" Guy wailed.
"That's of no importance if you're on the right end of a whip.
Edmund White
#61. You say that you don't care about age and that you're ready to push the wheelchair and hose down my bum, but how can you be sure?
Edmund White
#63. I've always deplored bad heterosexual values that dictate the minute a marriage is over the former partners no longer speak to each other; only straights could be so cruel and inhuman as to reject totally the person with whom they've shared their life for 20 or 30 years.
Edmund White
#64. I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought.
Edmund White
#65. From an early age, I had the idea that writing was truth-telling. It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature - the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious, and it should be totally transparent.
Edmund White
#66. My father was a misanthrope who slept all day and stayed up all night so that he wouldn't have to see people. He ran a business with a large staff but would go there at night and leave things for them to do during the day when he wasn't there.
Edmund White
#67. When my lover Hubert Sorin was dying of AIDS, he was always trying to fix me up - posthumously, as it were - with the cute busboy at the hotel.
Edmund White
#68. Women and gay men have something in common after all: in that they are trying to deal with this goofy egotistical monster called a man.
Edmund White
#69. Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books.
Edmund White
#71. Originally I was opposed to gay assimilation and targeted gay marriage as just another effort on the part of gays to resemble their straight neighbours.
Edmund White
#72. Sometimes Peggy herself would sell tickets to her museum, and if tourists asked her if Mrs. Guggenheim was still alive, she'd assure them she wasn't.
Edmund White
#73. In a novel, I think you have a contract with the reader to make the character representative - of a moment in history, a social class ... for instance, I wanted to make the boy in 'A Boy's Own Story' more like other gay men of my generation in their youth and not like me.
Edmund White
#74. What did they say about Helen of Troy? That her face launched a thousand ships? That's you, you're that beautiful. A thousand ships.
Edmund White
#75. Saint Guy of Anderlecht was the tenth-century Belgian saint of animals, stables, workhorses, and bachelors.
Edmund White
#76. Just like Barack Obama, my views on gay marriage have evolved, and now I am a reluctant groom.
Edmund White
#77. You always look your age, down to the last minute,
Edmund White
#78. In return for ten minutes of pleasure they design the rest of the day.
Edmund White
#79. Energy in itself is a sort of redemption. No wonder we admire Satan. But if the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed venetian blinds - oh if that were the devil I would fear him.
Edmund White
#80. Guy's own erection was so hard it ached, as if it were an angry dog begging to be let out and pawing at the door.
Edmund White
#81. Suffering does make us more sensitive until it crushes us completely.
Edmund White
#82. Was a glimpse of his cock worth a Mercedes?
Edmund White
#83. It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack.
Edmund White
#85. Paradoxically, since gay men rarely have gay parents, cultural transmission must come from friends or strangers (a problem since the generations so seldom mix in gay life).
Edmund White
#86. I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out.
Edmund White
#87. I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published.
Edmund White
#88. Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begins: If one man loves another he is a homosexual; I love a man ...
Edmund White
#89. In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.
Edmund White
#91. Gay life is this object out there that's waiting to be written about. A lot of people think we've exhausted all the themes of gay fiction, but we've just barely touched on them.
Edmund White
#92. In retrospect, we could see that the 1950s had been a reactionary period in America of Eisenhower blandness, of virulent anticommunism, of the 'Feminine Mystique.'
Edmund White
#93. Yet New York is always the chef, never the diner. Being
Edmund White
#94. The notion that I might have been able to court friends, win attention, conjure it, would have spoiled it for me. Unbidden love was what I wanted.
Edmund White
#95. Although Guy was thirty-five he was still working as a model, and certain of his more ironic and cultured friends called him, as the dying Proust had been called by Colette, 'our young man.
Edmund White
#96. I don't have to get married myself in order to campaign on behalf of gay marriage.
Edmund White
#97. I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things.
Edmund White
#98. Why did mainstream America come to accept marriage equality? Gay leaders had made a convincing case that gay families were like straight families and should have the same rights. The American spirit of fair play had been invoked.
Edmund White
#99. These absurd showbiz queens are as much a part of New York street life as sirens, steam from manholes, or ghostly Asian deliverymen ferrying chop-suey-to-go on unlit bikes going the wrong way.
Edmund White
#100. Key West is the place where your sickly house plant back in New York grows to 10 ft. It's also the place where an 8-ft. cactus, the century plant, produces a huge yellow flower every great once in a while, like a robot proffering a bouquet. After the plant flowers, it dies.
Edmund White
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