Edmund White quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Edmund White

Edmund White Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Edmund White on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack.

The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.

In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.

A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.

Wasn't it correct in America to call a man 'handsome' rather than 'beautiful'?

They all said the way to a man's heart was through his asshole.

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.

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.

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

You always look your age, down to the last minute,

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.

One of the side benefits of staying in the closet is you can have a much bigger career.

Yet New York is always the chef, never the diner. Being

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

He thought to himself, I'll never be this perfect again, an idea that made him sad.

Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better.

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.

Guy thought of the Greek word agon, wasn't it at once an athletic contest and a style of suffering, an agony?

He was amused by their 'ass stories' (histoires de cul) told over morning coffee at noon about their exploits the night before.

Gratitude is my chief erotic emotion.

Is that how you stay so fresh and young, drinking the sperm of teenage males?

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

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.

Paris can be like the land of the Lotus-Eaters. You can't leave.

You are the Perfect Young Man: honest, clean, virile.

Americans consider the sidewalk an anonymous backstage space, whereas for the French it is the stage itself.

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.

I don't have to get married myself in order to campaign on behalf of gay marriage.

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

The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.

Suddenly nothing in the world seemed to Guy more glamorous than homosexuality, as romantic as heady white gardenias nested in polished green leaves.

The natural enmity between leaver and left is like the absolute, immediate and always shifting hostility between driver and pedestrian.

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.

America was the attic of French culture.

For me a current lover has always been like whatever current book I'm writing - an obsessive project orienting all my thoughts.

Saint Guy of Anderlecht was the tenth-century Belgian saint of animals, stables, workhorses, and bachelors.

Stendhal had said a Frenchman was an Italian in a bad mood.

Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.

I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.

Suffering does make us more sensitive until it crushes us completely.

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.

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

His ribs were as visible as hands around a cup.

Paris ... is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.

In return for ten minutes of pleasure they design the rest of the day.

Was a glimpse of his cock worth a Mercedes?

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.

In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon.

Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets.

The Internet's impact is immense. My students can't imagine ever paying for a book.

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

Real men don't moisturise.

The Parisians looked at each other constantly but were more curious about each other's shoes than their sexual availability.

Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They've already lived their lives.

I'd learned to feel nostalgia for my own youth while I was living it.

Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction.

As you can hear, it's difficult to learn another language after forty.

Just think of dick as pussy on a stick.

I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published.

For these people religion is the only form of intellectuality.

Had he already inspired a passion in some stranger's heart?

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.

I hate writing. I almost never write. I write against deadlines. And when I'm teaching, I'm focused on that.

Just like Barack Obama, my views on gay marriage have evolved, and now I am a reluctant groom.

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.

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.

They kept flipping back and forth, but it wasn't clear which was the more exquisitely pleasurable pain, to penetrate or to be penetrated.

Don't let him lead you astray, my child. He's such a wicked man, woof!

At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later.

Hell is God's Absence.

I think I could be a cook. Everybody always says I'm good, though I think it's quite gruelling as a profession.

Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.

I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.

I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer.

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?

In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts.

I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.

When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist.

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

New York has been the subject of thousands of books. Every immigrant group has had its saga as has every epoch and social class.

AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s.

I think I'm very stoic. Death and dying are things that I'm used to.

So," he said. "What's the difference between me and a whore?" He swallowed. "Am I a whore?"
"No more than every married woman.

If the baron is a masochist himself, then why would he attract another masochist? I suppose he wants someone cute to attract other sadists.

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.

I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought.