Edmund White Quotes

He looked out over the shirtless, muscled, tanned men and realised that right here, on this disco floor, there was such a concentration of fashion, slimming, money, bleaching, plastic surgery, psychotherapy – and all for naught. In a few years they’d all be old walruses, and in a few more, dead.

Although Guy was thirty-five he was still working as a model, and certain of his more ironic and cultured friends called him, as the dying Proust had been called by Colette, ‘our young man.

So,” he said. “What’s the difference between me and a whore?” He swallowed. “Am I a whore?”
“No more than every married woman.

He was a good boy and ‘projected’ goodness – which later would be the downfall of many a person.

When history gives out, fiction takes over.

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.

I wanted power so badly that I had convinced myself I already had too much of it, that I was an evil schemer who might destroy everyone around me through the poison seeping out of my pores. I was appalled by my own majesty. I wanted someone to betray.

In America everyone called the merest acquaintance a ‘friend’ – Guy had taken up the habit. It made him feel better about not having any real friends.

People say young love or love of the moment isn't real, but I think the only love is the first. Later we hear its fleeting recapitulations throughout our lives, brief echoes of the original theme in a work that increasingly becomes all development, the mechanical elaboration of a crab canon with too many parts.

There’s something mystic and beautiful in the ineffable.

Everything we wrote was submitted to the editors above us, grizzled Korean War pilots with buzz cuts and an encyclopedic knowledge, who would routinely bounce our copy back and demand “fixes” (“More color,” “Doesn’t track,” or simply “Huh?” written in the margin).

All my life I’ve made friends and lost lovers and talked about these two activities as though they were very different, opposed; but in truth love is the direct and therefore hopeless method of calling Orpheus back, whereas friendship is the equally hopeless because irrelevant attempt to find warmth in other shades. Odd that in the story Orpheus is lonely, too.

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.

If the baron is a masochist himself, then why would he attract another masochist? I suppose he wants someone cute to attract other sadists.

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