Quotes by Edmund White

“But Im actually quite shy about my life in person.”

“I felt if I went chronologically, Id get bogged down in childhood and thats part of our culture of complaint in America. This endless wailing about your childhood.”

“I think its really interesting to talk about Foucault in one chapter and smelling poop in the basement in the next. It seems to me that life is just that complicated.”

“My Friends”

“I guess I felt I was lucky because history just happened to hand me all these empty niches, and it did fuel me. It is always exciting when you tap into some new subject matter.”

The most important things in our intimate lives cant be discussed with strangers, except in books.

Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule everyday. If youre not writing well, why continue it? I just dont think this grinding away is useful.

Im 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.

In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that just amused people. And most of the people that come and watch the gay Halloween parade, where all those excesses are on display, those are straight families, and they think its funny. But what people dont think is so funny is when two middle-aged lawyers who are married to each other move in next door to you and your wife and they have adopted a Korean girl and they want to send her to school with your children and they want to socialize with you and share a drink over the backyard fence. That creeps people out, especially Christians. So, I dont think gay marriage is a conservative issue. I think its a radical issue.

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

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

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.

He was taking Kevin’s cherry! The words made him harder and made him feel privileged, masterful, married. He thought how many men would pay unlimited amounts to have this inaugurating experience with this boy. He didn’t want to feel like a middle-aged paedophile, he didn’t even want to think all this would make a good porn film. He wanted every thrust, every second, to be laden with tenderness, a salute from him to Kevin, a deep recognition. He wanted Kevin to like what was being done to him, to push back for another joyous millimetre of penetration. He didn’t want him to label it Guy’s First Fuck or Kevin’s First Time. He didn’t want the idea and the label to crowd out the sensation or to sharpen it; he wanted it to be pure sex, undramatised.

Sex now seemed a strange thing to me, a social rite that registered, even brought about shifts in the balance of power, but something that was more discussed than performed, a simple emission of fluid that somehow generated religious, social and economic consequences.

There was something stubborn in me that didnt want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along, hed be able to see my virtues magically. Once he kissed me, the frog would turn into a prince. I had become a trick question, a heavy disguise, but behind the disobliging exterior was the welcoming child I would always be. Of course, what Id forgotten was that he was not Parsifal and I was not the Grail; the medievalism of my imagination was not sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that the lover was a shopper and I a product.

Gay life is this object out there that’s waiting to be written about. A lot of people think we’ve exhausted all the themes of gay fiction, but we’ve just barely touched on them.

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

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

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

If a writer has the desire to communicate by writing and be heard, then he necessarily cares about seeing it in print. I suppose its the difference between masturbation and making love—the real writer wants to touch another person.