Top 100 Edmund White Quotes
#1. It does seem like between the groundbreaking writing of Edmund White's generation and the work of younger gay writers in their twenties and thirties there is a kind of gap.
Garth Greenwell
#2. I was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that, I was a journalist. Eventually, I became an editor at 'The Saturday Review' and 'Horizon.'
Edmund White
#3. In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon.
Edmund White
#4. Europeans forget that one-third of the American people have had a personal conversation with Jesus Christ and that the born-again are not just little old ladies in black but also CEOs and provosts of universities and candidates for office.
Edmund White
#5. You are the Perfect Young Man: honest, clean, virile.
Edmund White
#6. If you're a beach person or a golfer, Key West is not for you. Most of the sand has been imported, and the water is shallow until you've waded far out, and all the way the sea floor is covered with yucky algae and sea grass.
Edmund White
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, 'Well, you have to die some way or another.' If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic: depressed but determined to keep the party going.
Edmund White
#11. 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
#12. They all said the way to a man's heart was through his asshole.
Edmund White
#13. 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
#14. He was amused by their 'ass stories' (histoires de cul) told over morning coffee at noon about their exploits the night before.
Edmund White
#15. For these people religion is the only form of intellectuality.
Edmund White
#17. Americans consider the sidewalk an anonymous backstage space, whereas for the French it is the stage itself.
Edmund White
#18. Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction.
Edmund White
#19. Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better.
Edmund White
#20. Everyone seems agreed that writing about sex is perilous, partly because it threatens to swamp highly individualised characters in a generic, featureless activity (much like coffee-cup dialogue, during which everyone sounds the same), and partly because it feels ... tacky.
Edmund White
#21. 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
#22. Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They've already lived their lives.
Edmund White
#23. Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.
Edmund White
#24. Is that how you stay so fresh and young, drinking the sperm of teenage males?
Edmund White
#25. Early on, after gay liberation, there was an almost Stalinist pressure from gay critics and even gay readers to write about positive role models. We were never supposed to write negative things about gays, or else we were seen as collaborating with the enemy.
Edmund White
#26. Don't let him lead you astray, my child. He's such a wicked man, woof!
Edmund White
#27. The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.
Edmund White
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 'The Sound of Things Falling' may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vasquez's prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean's idiomatic English version. All the novel's characters are well imagined, original and rounded.
Edmund White
#31. First, I was opposed to gay marriage because it seemed like one more way that gays were wanting to assimilate. When I realized the Christian right was so opposed to it, as well as tyrannical governments in Africa and Russia, I thought, 'It must be a good thing to fight for.'
Edmund White
#32. The talk shows in the States want celebrities, not authors. In France, it is different; writers are called upon to comment on everything. They have a very public role there.
Edmund White
#33. AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s.
Edmund White
#34. 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
#35. I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.
Edmund White
#36. Nothing I did or said among the other boys came to me naturally. As a result, in every encounter, even the most glancing, I had to be a performer, for at all times I was aware I was impersonating a human being.
Edmund White
#37. 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
#38. His ribs were as visible as hands around a cup.
Edmund White
#39. I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.
Edmund White
#40. 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
#41. Few writers in history have ever been 'politically correct' (a notion that rapidly changes in any case), and there's no reason to imagine that gay writers will ever suit their readers, especially since that readership is splintered into ghettos within ghettos.
Edmund White
#42. I think I'm very stoic. Death and dying are things that I'm used to.
Edmund White
#43. 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
#44. The Parisians looked at each other constantly but were more curious about each other's shoes than their sexual availability.
Edmund White
#45. 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
#46. I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.
Edmund White
#47. '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
#48. 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
#49. Someone once remarked that in adolescence pornography is a substitute for sex, whereas in adulthood sex is a substitute for pornography.
Edmund White
#50. I'd rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots.
Edmund White
#51. As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together.
Edmund White
#53. 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
#54. There is a whole industry in America of people who want to write, and those who teach it. Even if the students don't end up writing, what's good about them taking the courses is, they become great readers, learning to appreciate the writing.
Edmund White
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule everyday. If you're not writing well, why continue it? I just don't think this grinding away is useful.
Edmund White
#58. In his enigmatic and cunning story 'The Crown of Feathers,' Isaac Bashevis Singer refuses to produce uncontradictory evidence of God's will but rather mixes all signals, jams the evidence, stalls every conclusion.
Edmund White
#59. The natural enmity between leaver and left is like the absolute, immediate and always shifting hostility between driver and pedestrian.
Edmund White
#60. Had he already inspired a passion in some stranger's heart?
Edmund White
#61. 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
#62. At every moment I convinced myself that I was gathering material for the novel of my life - all experienced from the philosophical distance of the author. Even these humiliating occasions when I was robbed could be used as material. Life was a field trip.
Edmund White
#63. It is dull, Son of Adam, to drink without eating," said the Queen presently. "What would you like best to eat?"
"Turkish Delight, please, your Majesty," said Edmund.
C.S. Lewis
#64. 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
#65. He'd lived so much of his life for sexual love, which was a filthy thing, really, all that saliva and semen and anal smears, filthy! Much better to live alone and watch TV in bed or talk to Pierre-Georges as he was in his bed and watching the same movie. Both of them spotlessly clean.
Edmund White
#66. Wasn't it correct in America to call a man 'handsome' rather than 'beautiful'?
Edmund White
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. I was aware of the treacherous air vents above us, conducting the sounds we were making upstairs. Maybe dad was listening. Or maybe, just like Kevin, he was unaware of anything but the pleasure spurting up out of his body and into mine.
Edmund White
#70. If bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution for them; gays will never be fully accepted until they can marry and adopt, like anyone else.
Edmund White
#71. I suppose people hadn't really thought each decade should have its own character and be different from the others till the 1920s, although I remember in a nineteenth-century Russian novel someone remarked that a character was a typical man of the 1830s - progressive and an atheist.
Edmund White
#72. Guy thought of the Greek word agon, wasn't it at once an athletic contest and a style of suffering, an agony?
Edmund White
#73. 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
#74. The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties.
Edmund White
#75. I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer.
Edmund White
#76. I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.
Edmund White
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. My father was a sort of John Wayne Texan who'd worked as a cowboy when he was young. He'd participated in rattlesnake round-ups and swum with copperheads.
Edmund White
#80. All his leisure clothes were absurd - jokes, really - as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.
Edmund White
#81. He thought to himself, I'll never be this perfect again, an idea that made him sad.
Edmund White
#82. 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
#83. A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having "such a representative life". And it's true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.
Christopher Bram
#84. And William laughed with his special blend of mischief, compounded of humor, spite, and sadness in a ratio even he wasn't sure of but that he mixed by feel.
Edmund White
#85. Stendhal had said a Frenchman was an Italian in a bad mood.
Edmund White
#86. I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.
Edmund White
#87. 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
#88. I'd learned to feel nostalgia for my own youth while I was living it.
Edmund White
#89. Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood's complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we'd say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself from these in his autobiographical fiction).
Edmund White
#90. When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist.
Edmund White
#91. '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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.
Edmund White
#96. Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets.
Edmund White
#97. 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
#98. So," he said. "What's the difference between me and a whore?" He swallowed. "Am I a whore?"
"No more than every married woman.
Edmund White
#99. Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard.
Edmund White
#100. Nor did Kevin go, "Ew-w," when he pulled his penis out and it was brown and smelly, and that, too, Guy considered a rite de passage.
Edmund White
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