Edmund White Quotes

L'amour domestique - avec ses mélodrames adultères, ses compromis douillets, ses câlins asexués, ses prises de bec mesquines - me déplaisait précisément pare qu'il puait le possible, le faisable, ce que tout le monde faisait.

What did they say about Helen of Troy? That her face launched a thousand ships? That’s you, you’re that beautiful. A thousand ships.

A genius must never be seen struggling to master his craft. He starts out already accomplished.

I saw that the anger and hauteur of the past, which I’d accepted without interpreting, had been merely a counterpart to his isolation and the terrible shame he’d felt about the way he looked. If he couldn’t participate in the festivities of friendship and romance, then he’d burn the tents and poison the wells.

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

I'd learned to feel nostalgia for my own youth while I was living it.

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...

Someone said a writer should read three times more than he or she writes.

There is no greater pleasure than to lie between clean sheets, listen to music, and read under a strong light.

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

"I think he had no notion how little an effect the word sin had on me. He might as well have said, "Homosexuality is bad juju

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. One English critic took me to task for not saying that Genet was "afraid of intimacy" all his life because he'd been abandoned by his mother at the age of seven months. All the evidence needed to make such an interpretation is in my book, but I don't myself draw the vulgar conclusion. Since most literary biographies ignore the work except for potted plot summaries, they strip the biographee of everything redeeming and leave his or her subject to this spiteful revenge, this half-baked Freudian-Christian-bourgeois moralizing.

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

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?

When you see a book you want, buy it instantly because you may never find it again.