Edmund White Quotes

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

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.

This isn’t a banana republic. You can’t pull strings in America, pay off an official, lean on your cousin. It’s not like France or Spain – those banana republics.

Love is a source of anxiety until it is a source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit.

For me, as for many kids, words had a magical (and sometimes sexual) aura, and I would look up in my mother’s medical dictionary words such as penis, intercourse, or homosexuality, exciting words no matter how dispiriting the definition, exciting just because they appeared in print.

Suddenly nothing in the world seemed to Guy more glamorous than homosexuality, as romantic as heady white gardenias nested in polished green leaves.

There’s something mystic and beautiful in the ineffable.

Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They’ve already lived their lives.

In return for ten minutes of pleasure they design the rest of the day.

Kevin's parents had bumped me from my upstairs room, The place where last weak i had read Death In Venice and luxuriated in the tale of a dignified grown-up who died for the love of an indifferent boy my age. That was the sort of power i wanted over a man. And i awakened to the idea that a great world existed in which things happened and people changed, took risks-more, took notice: a world so sensitive, like a grand piano, that even a step or a word could awaken vibrations in its taught strings.

I sometimes wonder if what I consider “romance” might be dying out — l’amour fou, crazy love, destructive passion, crippling jealousy, extreme and violent and tragic.

When I did finally come to, I reported to Patrick that Valentino (not the dress designer but the silent movie star) had auditioned Patrick and me. At the climactic moment we had to twirl pantless, go into splits, and leave on the floor an inked impression of our anuses. Valentino had liked my impression more than Patrick’s and called me back for a second audition, which didn’t go so well.

Youngsters can plunder a text and find what they want in the margins.

For me a current lover has always been like whatever current book I'm writing - an obsessive project orienting all my thoughts.

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.