Edmund White famous quotes

The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.
-- Edmund White

#Book #Important #Stranger

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

#Book #Thinking #Perfect

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

#Hate #Adventure #Self

I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique
-- Edmund White

#Thinking #Technique #Sincerity

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

#Paris #Details #Pace

Ive 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

#Writing #Faithful #Way

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

#Father #Book #Israel

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

#Teacher #Book #Gay

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

#Beautiful #Book #Views

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

#Writing #America #Desire

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

#Teenager #Together #Identity

I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out.
-- Edmund White

#Avant Garde #Sincerity #Realism

Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard
-- Edmund White

#Boys #Stories

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

#Writing #Games #Challenges

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

#Sex #Hate #War

I'd rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots.
-- Edmund White

#Memories #Albums #Snapshots

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

#Years #Nostalgia #Young

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

#Children #Men #Imagination

These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.
-- Edmund White

#Hurt #Rejection #Rejected

Someone once remarked that in adolescence ***** is a substitute for sex, whereas in adulthood sex is a substitute for pornography.
-- Edmund White

#Sex #Cynical #Substitutes

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.
-- Edmund White

#Class #People #Avenging

I felt if I went chronologically, I'd get bogged down in childhood and that's part of our culture of complaint in America. This endless wailing about your childhood.
-- Edmund White

#America #Childhood #Culture

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

#Gay #Men #People

How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice.
-- Edmund White

#Book #Past #Sick

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

#Song #Crazy #Luxury

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

#School #Italian #Past

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

#Men #Order #Vagueness

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

#Winning #Might #Able

I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having too much sex. At what point does a healthy amount become too much? There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive; in their case the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such. When morality is discussed I invariably discover, halfway into the conversation, that what is meant are not the great ethical questions but the rather dreary business of sexual habit, which to my mind is an aesthetic rather than an ethical issue.
-- Edmund White

#Sex #Loneliness #Issues

All his leisure clothes were absurd - jokes, really - as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.
-- Edmund White

#Clothes #Leisure #Absurd

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

#Men #Reflection #Looks

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

#Years #Ideas #Views

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

#Communication #Understanding #Desire

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

#Memories #Thinking #Roots