Top 66 Edmund White Quotes

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

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

Paradoxically, since gay men rarely have gay parents, cultural transmission must come from friends or strangers (a problem since the generations so seldom mix in gay life).

I lived through the Fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening – the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone-deafness to the social injustice all around us – seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent.

From an early age, I had the idea that writing was truth-telling. It’s on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature – the holy book. There’s nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious, and it should be totally transparent.

Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood’s complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we’d say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself from these in his autobiographical fiction).

When a woman falls in love with me, I feel guilty. I am convinced that it’s pure obstinacy that keeps me from reciprocating her passion. As I explain to her that I’m gay, it sounds, even to me, like a silly excuse; I scarcely believe it myself.

‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is a masterpiece because it is an episodic novel that has a rigorous form – an unprecedented combination. From the very beginning we know the town of Macondo will endure only a century, so there is a limit to the length of the narrative.

When I was young, I despised old people. I was provincial and narrow-minded. It’s the reason I stayed stupid so long. If you only get involved with young people you don’t learn anything about the world.

If bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution for them; gays will never be fully accepted until they can marry and adopt, like anyone else.

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.

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

Why did mainstream America come to accept marriage equality? Gay leaders had made a convincing case that gay families were like straight families and should have the same rights. The American spirit of fair play had been invoked.

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

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

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

Nobody in France would ever say ‘He’s a Jewish novelist’ or ‘She’s a black novelist,’ even though people do write about those subjects. It would look absurd to a French person to go into a bookstore and see a ‘Gay Studies’ section.

When I was a child, I loved ‘The Marble Faun’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The reason I liked it was because it had a beautiful binding. When you’re a kid, you like books because they’re pretty to look at, and this one had a white calfskin cover and gold edges. That was enough to make me love it.

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 can remember in the late 1980s and early 1990s how many men with AIDS I saw everywhere in Key West. There were hospices and medical supply stores geared to people with AIDS. It seemed that every sick man who could afford it had headed for the warmth and the tranquillity and the gay-friendliness of the island.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

There are a lot of historical novelists who do the research about the clothes and maybe even the eating utensils, but they’re basically taking modern people and putting them in old drag – it’s sort of the ‘Gone With the Wind’ approach.

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

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

I’ve always been impelled to say the truth. When I was 14, in 1954, I already wrote a gay novel, though I’d never read one. I felt that life handed me a great subject, gay life, that had scarcely been examined, and I was impelled to record it in all its strange detail.

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

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

In his enigmatic and cunning story ‘The Crown of Feathers,’ Isaac Bashevis Singer refuses to produce uncontradictory evidence of God’s will but rather mixes all signals, jams the evidence, stalls every conclusion.

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

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

I can think of no other writer who so thoroughly embodies the Jamesian spirit as Alison Lurie. Like him she can excavate all the possibilities of a theme. Like his, her books seem long, unbroken threads, seamless progressions of effects.

In ‘A Boy’s Own Story’ and ‘Jack Holmes and His Friend,’ my idea was to take someone totally different from my real self and, at the same time, to assign to him my own life trajectory.

The one thing that is sort of sneered at and not really believed is bisexuality. Any bisexual man is just seen as a closeted gay man. That shows how narrow-minded people are. The other thing that’s totally neglected and which nobody approves of is celibacy. People again assume that you’re just repressing something.

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

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.

My father was a sort of John Wayne Texan who’d worked as a cowboy when he was young. He’d participated in rattlesnake round-ups and swum with copperheads.

I’ve accompanied several dying people on their travels, and the desert seems to be a favored destination. It is very hot and dry and lyrical in its own way.

‘The Truth About Lorin Jones’ will undoubtedly shock and offend as many readers as it will amuse, since it dares to make fun of feminism – of its manners, if not its politics.

My mother was terribly invasive, all in the name of psychiatric honesty. It was a bad thing in some ways, but I do think it had the effect of making me interested in ‘the truth’ as a writer – more than beauty, more than having a shapely story.

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

The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a ‘minority group,’ which made life much easier.

In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, ‘Well, you have to die some way or another.’ If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic: depressed but determined to keep the party going.

Since, in the best Southern tradition, I was named Edmund Valentine White III, sometimes when people look up my books on Amazon they find ‘Chocolate Drops from the South’ by my grandfather.

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

While writing ‘City Boy,’ I relied mainly on my own memories. In particular, I was able to describe the effect of gay liberation on an individual life (mine) as events paralleled my own growing self-acceptance; in this case, the political truly was the personal.

I always feel I’m better known in England than I am here in the U.S. Americans don’t read that much, and the French are very good at knowing the names of everybody.

First, I was opposed to gay marriage because it seemed like one more way that gays were wanting to assimilate. When I realized the Christian right was so opposed to it, as well as tyrannical governments in Africa and Russia, I thought, ‘It must be a good thing to fight for.’

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.