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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Edmund White Quotes

Women and gay men have something in common after all: in that they are trying to deal with this goofy egotistical monster called a man.

– Edmund White

Sometimes Peggy herself would sell tickets to her museum, and if tourists asked her if Mrs. Guggenheim was still alive, she’d assure them she wasn’t.

– Edmund White

As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn’t the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together.

– Edmund White

I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.

– Edmund White

A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.

– Edmund White

These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.

– Edmund White

Paris can be like the land of the Lotus-Eaters. You can’t leave.

– Edmund White

If I take a less defensive tone, I’d admit that I couldn’t write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire.

– Edmund White

In the 1970s in New York, everyone slept till noon. It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes by the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. The city seemed either frightening or risible to the rest of the nation.

– Edmund White

AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s.

– Edmund White

Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.

– Edmund White

I suppose people hadn’t really thought each decade should have its own character and be different from the others till the 1920s, although I remember in a nineteenth-century Russian novel someone remarked that a character was a typical man of the 1830s – progressive and an atheist.

– Edmund White

Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I’m determined to be one that gets better.

– Edmund White

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it’s seized on, even when it’s a far from perfect fit.

– Edmund White

Paradoxically, since gay men rarely have gay parents, cultural transmission must come from friends or strangers (a problem since the generations so seldom mix in gay life).

– Edmund White

The one thing that is sort of sneered at and not really believed is bisexuality. Any bisexual man is just seen as a closeted gay man. That shows how narrow-minded people are. The other thing that’s totally neglected and which nobody approves of is celibacy. People again assume that you’re just repressing something.

– Edmund White

I can think of no other writer who so thoroughly embodies the Jamesian spirit as Alison Lurie. Like him she can excavate all the possibilities of a theme. Like his, her books seem long, unbroken threads, seamless progressions of effects.

– Edmund White

I always feel I’m better known in England than I am here in the U.S. Americans don’t read that much, and the French are very good at knowing the names of everybody.

– Edmund White

One of the side benefits of staying in the closet is you can have a much bigger career.

– Edmund White

New York has been the subject of thousands of books. Every immigrant group has had its saga as has every epoch and social class.

– Edmund White

Nobody in France would ever say ‘He’s a Jewish novelist’ or ‘She’s a black novelist,’ even though people do write about those subjects. It would look absurd to a French person to go into a bookstore and see a ‘Gay Studies’ section.

– Edmund White

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

– Edmund White

I used to think that I could be successful if I pretended to be a 23-year-old black woman. I wanted to find a young black woman who would be willing to go in on this with me. I would write her novels, and then she would do the touring. I always thought I was too old and the wrong color.

– Edmund White

The Internet’s impact is immense. My students can’t imagine ever paying for a book.

– Edmund White

There are a lot of historical novelists who do the research about the clothes and maybe even the eating utensils, but they’re basically taking modern people and putting them in old drag – it’s sort of the ‘Gone With the Wind’ approach.

– Edmund White

I hate writing. I almost never write. I write against deadlines. And when I’m teaching, I’m focused on that.

– Edmund White

I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn’t want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting.

– Edmund White

I asked my body if it was going to die or not from AIDS. And it said ‘no.’ I sort of paid attention to that.

– Edmund White

In ‘A Boy’s Own Story’ and ‘Jack Holmes and His Friend,’ my idea was to take someone totally different from my real self and, at the same time, to assign to him my own life trajectory.

– Edmund White

The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I’d ever submitted to New York editors.

– Edmund White

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