Edmund White Quotes: top 89 famous quotes about Edmund White

Edmund White Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Edmund White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gratitude is my chief erotic emotion. — Edmund White

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Edmund White

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

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

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

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

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

America was the attic of French culture. — 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

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

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

my white plume"
- Cyrano de Bergerac — Edmund Rostand

Real men don't moisturise. — Edmund White

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

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

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

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

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

Was a glimpse of his cock worth a Mercedes? — Edmund White

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

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

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

His ribs were as visible as hands around a cup. — Edmund White

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

Suffering does make us more sensitive until it crushes us completely. — Edmund White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just think of dick as pussy on a stick. — Edmund White

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

For these people religion is the only form of intellectuality. — Edmund White

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

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

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

The White House is now essentially a TV performance. — Edmund Snow Carpenter

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

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. — Edmund White

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

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

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

Hell is God's Absence. — 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

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

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

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

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? — Edmund White

In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts. — Edmund White

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

When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist. — Edmund White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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