Edmund White Quotes
Top 87 wise famous quotes and sayings by Edmund White
Edmund White Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Edmund White on Wise Famous Quotes.
The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.
A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.
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.
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.
Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"That's of no importance if you're on the right end of a whip.
Paris ... is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.
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.
The Parisians looked at each other constantly but were more curious about each other's shoes than their sexual availability.
Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
So," he said. "What's the difference between me and a whore?" He swallowed. "Am I a whore?"
"No more than every married woman.
"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.