Edmund White

Hell is God's Absence.

— Edmund White

In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts.

— Edmund White

I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique

— Edmund White

“Suffering does make us more sensitive until it crushes us completely.”

— Edmund White

I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer.

— Edmund White

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

— Edmund White

I think I'm very stoic. Death and dying are things that I'm used to.

— Edmund White

Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard

— Edmund White

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

— Edmund White

At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later.

— Edmund White

I think I could be a cook. Everybody always says I'm good, though I think it's quite gruelling as a profession.

— Edmund White

The notion that I might have been able to court friends, win attention, conjure it, would have spoiled it for me. Unbidden…

— Edmund White

Ive always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to…

— Edmund White

The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.

— Edmund White

Paradoxically, since gay men rarely have gay parents, cultural transmission must come from friends or strangers (a problem since the generations so…

— 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

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

— Edmund White

Looking back, I can see that the women I loved, at least early on, were status symbols. I suppose, in that sense,…

— Edmund White

Barack Obama's decision to come out in favour of gay marriage may be a historic occasion, but it is not an isolated…

— 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…

— Edmund White

“The French have such an attractive civilization, dedicated to calm pleasures and general tolerance, and their taste in every domain is so…

— Edmund White

In his enigmatic and cunning story 'The Crown of Feathers,' Isaac Bashevis Singer refuses to produce uncontradictory evidence of God's will but…

— Edmund White

If I had been straight, I would have been an entirely different person. I would never have turned toward writing with a…

— Edmund White

The almost Oriental politeness of the West Coast is one of its distinctive regional features, in marked contrast to the contentiousness of…

— Edmund White

In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys, in Bloomfield Hills,…

— Edmund White

“Sometimes I have the feeling that we're in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of…

— Edmund White

In our imaginations the adults of our childhood remain extreme, essential - we might say radical since they are the roots that…

— Edmund White

There was something stubborn in me that didn't want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along,…

— Edmund White

San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular…

— Edmund White

For most Northerners, Texas is the home of real men. The cowboys, the rednecks, the outspoken self-made right-wing millionaires strike us as…

— Edmund White

I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having too much sex. At what point does a healthy…

— Edmund White

Sharona Muir has written a gripping personal memoir about her odyssey to rediscover and reclaim her father. Along the way she uncovers…

— Edmund White

“I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young,…

— Edmund White

I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published.

— Edmund White

“Is that how you stay so fresh and young, drinking the sperm of teenage males?”

— Edmund White

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

— Edmund White

Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.

— Edmund White

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

— Edmund White

When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist.

— Edmund White

“In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon.”

— Edmund White