Edmund White Quotes

That a life could be changed posited the still more thrilling notion that one had a thing called a life, a wonderful being that was growing silently inside like an infant.

Gratitude is my chief erotic emotion.

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

I still feel like a young girl, as though everything is about to happen.

Like many hard-bitten cynics, he cried easily and was always falling into fluttery love with his type, clean-cut Yalies.

In my twenties if even a tenth reading of Mallarmé failed to yield up its treasures, the fault was mine, not his. If my eyes swooned shut while I read The Sweet Cheat Gone, Proust’s pacing was never called into question, just my intelligence and dedication and sensitivity. And I still entertain these sacralizing preconceptions about high art. I still admire what is difficult, though I now recognize it as a “period” taste and that my generation was the last to give a damn. Though we were atheists, we were, strangely enough, preparing ourselves for God’s great Quiz Show; we had to know everything because we were convinced we would be tested on it — in our next life.

The best explanation of masochism, the appeal of masochism, is that it accepts shame; the sickening shame one must swallow and hide is at last accepted, employed, even loved — the shame about a mutilation, hairiness, too much or not enough fat, the shame about wanting to serve, to be a dog, son, wife, slave, horse, prisoner.

You’re universally liked because you’re such a black hole in space. You don’t have any real traits. You’re sympa, at least as much as a narcissist can be, but that means nothing. You’re beautiful and everybody projects onto you what they’re looking for, which is easy to do since you don’t stand for anything definite. You’re a black hole in space.

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

I knew I was worthless and at the same time I was convinced somebody would find me worthy, would worship me for this sexual allure so foreign to my understanding yet so central to my being.

Precision is easier to master than artful vagueness, especially now when, thanks to Google, novels are fact-heavy. We no longer refer to “flowers” but to particular varieties of roses. The whole valuable distinction between foreground (precise) and background (blurred) has been lost, and now everything is crowding toward the viewer, clamoring for attention.

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.

for him, music was emotion, and he did not believe in discussing feelings.

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 I had instead was the ache of waiting and the fear I wasn’t worthy.