Edmund White Quotes

Quotes about:

Books Desire Hate Imagination Writing

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

Edmund White

Book, Important, Stranger

Edmund White (1988). “The Beautiful Room is Empty”, Random House Incorporated

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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...

Edmund White

Book, Thinking, Perfect

"A Conversation with Edmond White By Edmond White". www.dalkeyarchive.com. 1996.

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

Edmund White

Thinking, Technique, Sincerity

The Review of Contemporary Fiction Intreview, www.dalkeyarchive.com. 1996.

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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

Paris, Details, Pace

Edmund White (2016). “The Flaneur”, p.20, Bloomsbury Publishing

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

Edmund White

Thinking, Opportunity, Emergencies

Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.42, Pan Macmillan

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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.

Edmund White

Writing, Faithful, Way

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I'm an atheist, I always thought, 'This is it.' If there is going to be a heaven, it should be on earth. I feel much happier than most people. I'm fairly stoic about death, but I'm not keen on dying if it's going to be long and protracted. I don't have dark nights of the soul, except occasionally. I'm such a little busy bee.

Edmund White

Atheist, Dark, Night

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I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having too much sex. At what point does a healthy amount become too much? There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive; in their case the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such. When morality is discussed I invariably discover, halfway into the conversation, that what is meant are not the great ethical questions but the rather dreary business of sexual habit, which to my mind is an aesthetic rather than an ethical issue.

Edmund White

Sex, Loneliness, Ethical Questions

"States of Desire: Travels in Gay America". Book by Edmund White, 1980.

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

Edmund White

Memories, Albums, Snapshots

"Jack Holmes and His Friend". Book by Edmund White, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2012.

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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.

Edmund White

Years, Nostalgia, Young

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The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War.

Edmund White

Sex, Hate, War

States of Desire: Travels in Gay America "Afterword - AIDS: An American Epidemic" (1986)

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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.

Edmund White

Writing, Two, Say Anything

Edmund White, David Bergman (1995). “The Burning Library: Essays”, Vintage

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Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and intermittently self-hating, very hip, rebellious. Figuring her out is a gripping adventure.

Edmund White

Hate, Adventure, Self

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How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice.

Edmund White

Book, Past, Sick

"A Boy's Own Story". Book by Edmund White, 1982.

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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.

Edmund White

Communication, Understanding, Desire

Edmund White (2014). “States of Desire Revisited: Travels in Gay America”, p.128, University of Wisconsin Pres

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Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begins: If one man loves another he is a homosexual; I love a man.

Edmund White

Men, Order, Vagueness

Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.84, Pan Macmillan

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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

Edmund White

Teenager, Together, Identity

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Hell is God's Absence.

Edmund White

Hell, Absence

Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.138, Pan Macmillan

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

Edmund White

Writing, Forgotten, Draws

Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.62, Pan Macmillan

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Energy in itself is a sort of redemption. No wonder we admire Satan. But if the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed venetian blinds - oh if that were the devil I would fear him.

Edmund White

Men, Devil, Energy

Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.90, Pan Macmillan

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

Edmund White

Avant Garde, Sincerity, Realism

"A Conversation with Edmond White By Edmond White". The Review of Contemporary Fiction Interview, www.dalkeyarchive.com. Fall 1996.

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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.

Edmund White

America, Childhood, Culture

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

Edmund White

People, Imagination, Consolation

Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.49, Pan Macmillan

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Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the stage that they use constantly in conversation, in the same way we may look to written language as an idealization rather than a reflection of ourselves.

Edmund White

Reflection, Men, Looks

Edmund White (2014). “States of Desire Revisited: Travels in Gay America”, p.284, University of Wisconsin Pres

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The school was nothing but reminiscence - of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.

Edmund White

School, Italian, Past

Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.102, Pan Macmillan

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Born: January 13, 1940
Occupation: Novelist
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