Edmund White Quotes

Other writers, especially the ones you admire, can steer you to good books.

I’d been waiting and waiting year after year to grow up so I could lead the gay life, and all the while I’d been wasting my most precious capital, my youth.

At my age (seventy-eight), I realize that everyone, or almost everyone except Hitler, will be forgotten from this period; if a writer can shore up an eroding coastline for a decade or two, that’s the only “immortality” we’ll ever know on this dying planet.

Was I grieving because he didn’t possess everything, absolutely everything, or because I owned nothing?

In the 1950s the three most heinous things in America were heroin use, communism, and homosexuality.

What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed, the dull brown geode that eats at itself with quartz teeth?

It's a mild hell so comfortable that it resembles heaven.

The thought of resuming my life made me want to end it — unless I could change it completely.

Charles used to say, “If God had meant boys to be fucked, he would have put a hole in their ass.

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

That man's embrace around the waist set me spinning like a dancer across the darkened stage of the city; my turns led me to Fountain Square, the center.

He’d had a few sordid gay experiences. He’d wrestled with an obese neighbour boy in Clermont-Ferrand when he was fourteen and last year had been approached in the Clermont-Ferrand train station loo by an obscene old man who’d removed his dentures, wagged his tongue, and pointed to his open, pulsing mouth.

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.

They kept flipping back and forth, but it wasn’t clear which was the more exquisitely pleasurable pain, to penetrate or to be penetrated.

Americans were so enthusiastic on first meeting; I'd forgotten that enthusiasm didn't mean anything. The cliche among Europeans was that friendships with Americans didn't go anywhere.