Edmund White Quotes

Saint Guy of Anderlecht was the tenth-century Belgian saint of animals, stables, workhorses, and bachelors.

There’s more to contemporary literature than American coffee-cup realism.

Whoever has not known the pleasures of open stacks — with their erotically charged corridors.

The observer is a prince who, wearing a disguise, takes pleasure everywhere.

That eminently Parisian compromise between laziness and activity known as flanerie.

Americans are particularly ill-suited to be flaneurs. They are always driven by the urge towards self-improvement.

In New York you can tell by people's body language that no one cares what other people think of them, whereas in Paris everyone is judging everyone and the only people who have this American-style insouciance are the insane.

You say that you don’t care about age and that you’re ready to push the wheelchair and hose down my bum, but how can you be sure?

A genius must never be seen struggling to master his craft. He starts out already accomplished.

Reading books for pleasure, of course, is the greatest joy. No need to underline, press on, try out mentally summarizing or evaluating phrases. One is free to read as a child reads — no duties, no goals, no responsibilities, no clock ticking: pure rapture.

There was no way to defend what I was. All I could fight for was my right to choose my exile, my destruction.

The novel is alive and thriving through various strategies of renovation. The merging of fiction and reality, of memoir and narrative, is one great current source of strength. The reimagining of the historical novel is a second. And the third is the admission of new voices previously unheard or slienced.

The French word for “plot,” trame, also means “heft” or “weave.

The poet must steal fire from the heavens.

Critics always praise precision in writing, and some great writers (Joyce, Beckett, Gustave Flaubert) are masters of clarity — but one of the great (and seldom mentioned) resources of fiction is vagueness.

Young people dislike and even fail to understand our slang; my gay students ask me what “tricking” means. It’s all old whore’s slang, of course.

I asked him what it was like to live in a monastery and meditate for a year. He said it was a waste of time, that he never meditated, and that the older monks were interested only in feeling up boys, playing cards, and telling fortunes, that they were a dirty, lazy, superstitious lot.

They all said the way to a man’s heart was through his asshole.