Writer Quotes by Edmund White

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

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

— Edmund White

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

— Edmund White

Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood's complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had…

— Edmund White

My mother was terribly invasive, all in the name of psychiatric honesty. It was a bad thing in some ways, but I…

— 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

'The Sound of Things Falling' may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in…

— Edmund White

When I was a child, I loved 'The Marble Faun' by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The reason I liked it was because it had…

— Edmund White

I was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that, I was a journalist. Eventually,…

— Edmund White

The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,' the relatives would ring up in…

— Edmund White

I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and…

— 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

“In my twenties if even a tenth reading of Mallarmé failed to yield up its treasures, the fault was mine, not his.…

— Edmund White

It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack.

— Edmund White

There is a whole industry in America of people who want to write, and those who teach it. Even if the students…

— Edmund White

“Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule everyday. If you're not…

— Edmund White

Part of my problem as a young writer was that I was too much a New Yorker, always second-guessing the 'market.' I…

— Edmund White

I can think of no other writer who so thoroughly embodies the Jamesian spirit as Alison Lurie. Like him she can excavate…

— Edmund White