Edmund White Quotes

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Hell is God's Absence.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

In America everyone called the merest acquaintance a ‘friend’ – Guy had taken up the habit. It made him feel better about not having any real friends.

He was a good boy and ‘projected’ goodness – which later would be the downfall of many a person.

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?

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

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

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

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

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.