Best Edmund White Quotes
- The culmination of a long struggle was 2013, which could clearly be labeled the Year of the Gay. State after state had legalized gay marriage,… Clearly
- AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s. Aids
- Why did mainstream America come to accept marriage equality? Gay leaders had made a convincing case that gay families were like straight families and should… Accept
- A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people. Gay
- Early on, after gay liberation, there was an almost Stalinist pressure from gay critics and even gay readers to write about positive role models. We… Collaborating
- One of the side benefits of staying in the closet is you can have a much bigger career. Benefits
- Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory. Allegory
- 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… Alison
- Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction. Body
- In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre. Bizarre
- Everyone seems agreed that writing about sex is perilous, partly because it threatens to swamp highly individualised characters in a generic, featureless activity (much like… Activity
- Europeans forget that one-third of the American people have had a personal conversation with Jesus Christ and that the born-again are not just little old… American
- America thrives on identity politics, left and right. But France is opposed to the idea. Since the Revolution, the French have enthroned the idea of… Abstract
- 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… Cultural
- The natural enmity between leaver and left is like the absolute, immediate and always shifting hostility between driver and pedestrian. Absolute
- 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… Bankrupt
- Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets. Intense
- New York has been the subject of thousands of books. Every immigrant group has had its saga as has every epoch and social class. Been
- I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought. Brought
- 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… Always Thought
- The talk shows in the States want celebrities, not authors. In France, it is different; writers are called upon to comment on everything. They have… Authors
- Originally, I was against gay marriage because I was opposed to all marriage, being an old-fashioned gay bohemian. The straight people I knew in the… All
- 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. All
- I can remember in the late 1980s and early 1990s how many men with AIDS I saw everywhere in Key West. There were hospices and… Afford
- I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published. Ambitious