Edmund White Quotes - Page 2

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Books Desire Hate Imagination Writing

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

Edmund White

Class, People, Avenging

Self-interview, Dalkey Archive Press, 1994.

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

Edmund White

Flames, Ashes, Intensity

Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.117, Pan Macmillan

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

Edmund White

Clothes, Leisure, Absurd

Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.10, Pan Macmillan

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

Edmund White

Hurt, Rejection, Rejected

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In our imaginations the adults of our childhood remain extreme, essential - we might say radical since they are the roots that fed luxuriant later systems. Those first bohemians, for instance, stay operatic in memory even though were we to meet them today - well, what would we think, we who've elaborated our eccentricities with a patience, a professionalism they never knew?

Edmund White

Memories, Thinking, Roots

"A Boy's Own Story". Book by Edmund White, E.P. Dutton, Chapter Four, p. 92, 1982.

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There was something stubborn in me that didn't want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along, he'd 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 I'd 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.

Edmund White

Children, Men, Imagination

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In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Edmund White

Teacher, Book, Gay

Interview with Edmond White, www.dalkeyarchive.com. 1994.

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There is an enormous pressure placed on gay novelists because they are the only spokespeople. The novelist's first obligation is to be true to his own vision, not to be some sort of common denominator or public relations man to all gay people.

Edmund White

Gay, Men, People

Publishers Weekly, September 24, 1982.

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

Edmund White

Sex, Cynical, Substitutes

Edmund White (2014). “States of Desire Revisited: Travels in Gay America”, p.278, University of Wisconsin Pres

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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.

Edmund White

Beautiful, Book, Views

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

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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.

Edmund White

Writing, America, Desire

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

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

Edmund White

Success, Boys, Stories

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

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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

Edmund White

Writing, Games, Challenges

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Being up on something is a way of dismissing it. To espouse any point of view is a danger - it might leave us stuck with last year's cause. Prized for their novelty alone, ideas, gimmicks, trends become equivalent, interchangeable.

Edmund White

Views, Years, Ideas

Edmund White (2014). “States of Desire Revisited: Travels in Gay America”, p.260, University of Wisconsin Pres

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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

Dream, Irrelevance, Shadow

Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.34, Pan Macmillan

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Sharona Muir has written a gripping personal memoir about her odyssey to rediscover and reclaim her father. Along the way she uncovers some hard truths about the heroic founders of Israel and the Beginnings of Israeli science. The Book of Telling keeps in all the fears and resentments and consolations and warmth of such a process-at once her own story and the tale of a nation.

Edmund White

Father, Book, Israel

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Dreadful is a poignant biography of a forgotten man who drank himself to death. It's a brilliant evocation of a self-hating gay novelist in the 1940s whom Gore Vidal once considered a rival.

Edmund White

Hate, Gay, Men

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The almost Oriental politeness of the West Coast is one of its distinctive regional features, in marked contrast to the contentiousness of the East Coast.... So few human contacts in Los Angeles go unmediated by glass (either a TV screen or an automobile windshield), that the direct confrontation renders the participants docile, stunned, sweet.

Edmund White

Sweet, Glasses, West

Edmund White (2014). “States of Desire Revisited: Travels in Gay America”, p.1, University of Wisconsin Pres

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San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled--or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? Did we anticipate the ways in which, vivid and continuous, they would unsuit us for the business of daily life? Or should our notion of daily life itself be transformed?

Edmund White

Dream, Gay, Cities

Edmund White (2014). “States of Desire Revisited: Travels in Gay America”, p.30, University of Wisconsin Pres

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The scorn directed against drags is especially virulent; they have become the outcasts of gay life, the "queers" of homosexuality.In fact, they are classic scapegoats. Our old fears about our sissiness, still with us though masked by the new macho fascism, are now located, isolated, quarantined through our persecution of the transvestite.

Edmund White

Gay, Facts, Classic

Edmund White (2014). “States of Desire Revisited: Travels in Gay America”, p.51, University of Wisconsin Pres

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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

Winning, Attention, Might

Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.79, Pan Macmillan

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Recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway of a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or too homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners (or the luxury of systematic, sustained and shared introspection, so sexual in its own way). All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes.

Edmund White

Song, Crazy, Luxury

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

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For most Northerners, Texas is the home of real men. The cowboys, the rednecks, the outspoken self-made right-wing millionaires strike us as either the best or worst examples of American manliness.... The ideal is not an illusion nor is it contemptible, no matter what damage it may have done. Many people who scorn it in conversation want to submit to it in bed. Those who believe machismo reeks of violence alone choose to forget it once stood for honor as well.

Edmund White

Real, Believe, Home

1980 States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, ch.5.

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Born: January 13, 1940
Occupation: Novelist
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