Edmund White Quotes

Fréquenter un écrivain, le connaître de près, dans l'espoir de mieux connaître son oeuvre était un exercice inutile et même destructeur.

Stendhal had said a Frenchman was an Italian in a bad mood.

Now, that’s what you call a vicious French queen. I never discussed your penis size – ”
“Bet you did,” Kevin said, “at the beginning. I’ve heard the way gay guys talk at the gym. Nothing’s sacred. Not even my poor little penis.

As you can hear, it’s difficult to learn another language after forty.

Was a glimpse of his cock worth a Mercedes?

you always look your age, down to the last minute,

Many French people were difficult conversationalists. Asking them not only where they were originally from but what they did in life was considered rude — I suppose because many of them did nothing (many Parisians are rentiers, people who live off the rents of their properties) or because they weren’t proud of their jobs, which simultaneously supported and interfered with their intellectual and artistic passions.

Yet New York is always the chef, never the diner.

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

Everything I touched or did spoke to me of sadness. Each article of clothing — shirt, tie, jacket — felt cut out of different bolts of sadness, each a peculiar weave and shape and hang of sadness, as though sadness came in lots of styles.

I've lost over twenty friends [to AIDS]. I've seen a world vanish-a culture that has been oppressed in one generation, liberated in the nest, and wiped out in the next.

They’re drunk now,” Guy said, “and optimistic, but they will soon be squabbling over household expenses and hoping they’ll find love later in the Meat Rack. They’ll be arguing. ‘Why did you buy that expensive leg of lamb?’ And they become especially cross at the beginning of September when they realise the season is over and they’ve danced their tushes off and fucked a lot in the bushes, but, hey, they haven’t bagged a beau for the winter and they’ve maxed out their credit cards.

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

That’s one of the problems — and joys — of old age: every time you read a book it’s the first.

He thought to himself, I’ll never be this perfect again, an idea that made him sad.