Edmund White Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Edmund White.
Famous Quotes By Edmund White
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
There was something stubborn in me that didn't want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along, he'd be able to see my virtues magically. Once he kissed me, the frog would turn into a prince. I had become a trick question, a heavy disguise, but behind the disobliging exterior was the welcoming child I would always be. Of course, what I'd forgotten was that he was not Parsifal and I was not the Grail; the medievalism of my imagination was not sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that the lover was a shopper and I a product. — Edmund White
The culmination of a long struggle was 2013, which could clearly be labeled the Year of the Gay. State after state had legalized gay marriage, despite intense opposition from the religious right. — Edmund White
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
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
Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory. — Edmund White
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
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
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
Guy believed everything in sex should be done slowly so as not to scare the wildlife and to ensure his own natural grace and poise. — Edmund White
'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
The almost Oriental politeness of the West Coast is one of its distinctive regional features, in marked contrast to the contentiousness of the East Coast ... So few human contacts in Los Angeles go unmediated by glass (either a TV screen or an automobile windshield), that the direct confrontation renders the participants docile, stunned, sweet. — Edmund White
On Fire Island everyone was in a Speedo pulling a wagon of groceries across the bumpy boardwalk; you couldn't tell the houseboys from the bankers. — Edmund White
Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets. — Edmund White
In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre. — Edmund White
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
For most Northerners, Texas is the home of real men. The cowboys, the rednecks, the outspoken self-made right-wing millionaires strike us as either the best or worst examples of American manliness ... The ideal is not an illusion nor is it contemptible, no matter what damage it may have done. Many people who scorn it in conversation want to submit to it in bed. Those who believe machismo reeks of violence alone choose to forget it once stood for honor as well. — Edmund White
No sooner would such a temptation present itself than I would smother it. The effect was of snuffing out a candle, two candles, a row of twenty, until the lens pulled back to reveal an entire votive stand exhaling a hundred thin lines of smoke as a terraced offering before the shrine. In this religion hidden lights had been declared superior to those that glared. Somewhere I was storing up merit, accumulating the credit I'd need to buy, one day, the salvation I longed for. Until then (and it was a reckoning that could be forestalled indefinitely, that I preferred putting off) I'd live in that happiest of all conditions: the long but seemingly prosperous courtship. It was a series of tests, ever more arduous, even perverse. For instance, I was required to deny my love in order to prove it. — Edmund White
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
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
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
I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting. — Edmund White
'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
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
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
The one thing that is sort of sneered at and not really believed is bisexuality. Any bisexual man is just seen as a closeted gay man. That shows how narrow-minded people are. The other thing that's totally neglected and which nobody approves of is celibacy. People again assume that you're just repressing something. — Edmund White
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
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
San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled
or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? Did we anticipate the ways in which, vivid and continuous, they would unsuit us for the business of daily life? Or should our notion of daily life itself be transformed? — Edmund White
I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought. — Edmund White
Just think of dick as pussy on a stick. — Edmund White
'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
The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier. — Edmund White
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
Recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway of a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or too homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners (or the luxury of systematic, sustained and shared introspection, so sexual in its own way). All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes. — Edmund White
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
I used to think that I could be successful if I pretended to be a 23-year-old black woman. I wanted to find a young black woman who would be willing to go in on this with me. I would write her novels, and then she would do the touring. I always thought I was too old and the wrong color. — Edmund White
For me a current lover has always been like whatever current book I'm writing - an obsessive project orienting all my thoughts. — Edmund White
Don't let him lead you astray, my child. He's such a wicked man, woof! — Edmund White
The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books. — Edmund White
Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization. — Edmund White
AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s. — Edmund White
In our imaginations the adults of our childhood remain extreme, essential - we might say radical since they are the roots that fed luxuriant later systems. Those first bohemians, for instance, stay operatic in memory even though were we to meet them today - well, what would we think, we who've elaborated our eccentricities with a patience, a professionalism they never knew? — Edmund White
I can remember in the late 1980s and early 1990s how many men with AIDS I saw everywhere in Key West. There were hospices and medical supply stores geared to people with AIDS. It seemed that every sick man who could afford it had headed for the warmth and the tranquillity and the gay-friendliness of the island. — Edmund White
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
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
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
I'd learned to feel nostalgia for my own youth while I was living it. — Edmund White
I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer. — Edmund White
I think I could be a cook. Everybody always says I'm good, though I think it's quite gruelling as a profession. — Edmund White
The scorn directed against drags is especially virulent; they have become the outcasts of gay life, the "queers" of homosexuality.In fact, they are classic scapegoats. Our old fears about our sissiness, still with us though masked by the new macho fascism, are now located, isolated, quarantined through our persecution of the transvestite. — Edmund White
Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. — Edmund White
Americans consider the sidewalk an anonymous backstage space, whereas for the French it is the stage itself. — Edmund White
I hate writing. I almost never write. I write against deadlines. And when I'm teaching, I'm focused on that. — Edmund White
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
Gratitude is my chief erotic emotion. — Edmund White
A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people. — Edmund White
These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected. — Edmund White
For the real movements of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object, as in those perceptual tests where figure and ground reverse, the kissing couple in profile turn into the outlines of the mortuary urn that holds their own ashes. Time wears down resolve
then suddenly violence, something irrevocable flashes out of nowhere, there are thrashing fins and roiled, blood-streaked water, death floats up on its side, eyes bulging. — Edmund White
I lived through the Fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening - the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone-deafness to the social injustice all around us - seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent. — Edmund White
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
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
When I was young, I despised old people. I was provincial and narrow-minded. It's the reason I stayed stupid so long. If you only get involved with young people you don't learn anything about the world. — Edmund White
At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later. — Edmund White
The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure. — Edmund White
When we are young ... we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now. — Edmund White
Suffering does make us more sensitive until it crushes us completely. — Edmund White
They all said the way to a man's heart was through his asshole. — Edmund White
Barack Obama's decision to come out in favour of gay marriage may be a historic occasion, but it is not an isolated one. His administration has been making pro-gay noises for some time; his demographic in the upcoming election is young and educated, precisely the group that favours equality for the LGBT community. — Edmund White
Sharona Muir has written a gripping personal memoir about her odyssey to rediscover and reclaim her father. Along the way she uncovers some hard truths about the heroic founders of Israel and the Beginnings of Israeli science. The Book of Telling keeps in all the fears and resentments and consolations and warmth of such a process-at once her own story and the tale of a nation. — Edmund White
He was taking Kevin's cherry! The words made him harder and made him feel privileged, masterful, married. He thought how many men would pay unlimited amounts to have this inaugurating experience with this boy. He didn't want to feel like a middle-aged paedophile, he didn't even want to think all this would make a good porn film. He wanted every thrust, every second, to be laden with tenderness, a salute from him to Kevin, a deep recognition. He wanted Kevin to like what was being done to him, to push back for another joyous millimetre of penetration. He didn't want him to label it Guy's First Fuck or Kevin's First Time. He didn't want the idea and the label to crowd out the sensation or to sharpen it; he wanted it to be pure sex, undramatised. — Edmund White
Stendhal had said a Frenchman was an Italian in a bad mood. — Edmund White
If I take a less defensive tone, I'd admit that I couldn't write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire. — Edmund White
There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That's a crucial age, although it's very hard to judge who is worth supporting and who is not. Looking back on my own life, I see that was the period when I was closest to giving up as a novelist and when I most needed some encouragement. — Edmund White
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
Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash. — Edmund White
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
Is that how you stay so fresh and young, drinking the sperm of teenage males? — Edmund White
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
The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War. — Edmund White
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
Nobody in France would ever say 'He's a Jewish novelist' or 'She's a black novelist,' even though people do write about those subjects. It would look absurd to a French person to go into a bookstore and see a 'Gay Studies' section. — Edmund White
The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors. — Edmund White
Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They've already lived their lives. — Edmund White
You always look your age, down to the last minute, — Edmund White
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
Just like Barack Obama, my views on gay marriage have evolved, and now I am a reluctant groom. — Edmund White
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
He'd had a few sordid gay experiences. He'd wrestled with an obese neighbour boy in Clermont-Ferrand when he was fourteen and last year had been approached in the Clermont-Ferrand train station loo by an obscene old man who'd removed his dentures, wagged his tongue, and pointed to his open, pulsing mouth. — Edmund White
I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of "coffee shops" as they were defined in New York - cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know. — Edmund White
Had he already inspired a passion in some stranger's heart? — Edmund White
One of the side benefits of staying in the closet is you can have a much bigger career. — Edmund White
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
The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,' the relatives would ring up in high dudgeon. I once wrote a mocking review of Marguerite Duras in the 'New York Review of Books,' and good friends of mine in France got very angry. — Edmund White
I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published. — Edmund White