Edmund White Quotes

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

~ Edmund White

In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that just amused people. And most of the people that come and watch the gay Halloween parade, where all those excesses are on display, those are straight families, and they think it's funny. But what people don't think is so funny is when two middle-aged lawyers who are married to each other move in next door to you and your wife and they have adopted a Korean girl and they want to send her to school with your children and they want to socialize with you and share a drink over the backyard fence. That creeps people out, especially Christians. So, I don't think gay marriage is a conservative issue. I think it's a radical issue.

~ Edmund White

Had he already inspired a passion in some stranger’s heart?

~ Edmund White

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

~ Edmund White

Guy believed everything in sex should be done slowly so as not to scare the wildlife and to ensure his own natural grace and poise.

~ Edmund White

He was taking Kevin’s cherry! The words made him harder and made him feel privileged, masterful, married. He thought how many men would pay unlimited amounts to have this inaugurating experience with this boy. He didn’t want to feel like a middle-aged paedophile, he didn’t even want to think all this would make a good porn film. He wanted every thrust, every second, to be laden with tenderness, a salute from him to Kevin, a deep recognition. He wanted Kevin to like what was being done to him, to push back for another joyous millimetre of penetration. He didn’t want him to label it Guy’s First Fuck or Kevin’s First Time. He didn’t want the idea and the label to crowd out the sensation or to sharpen it; he wanted it to be pure sex, undramatised.

~ Edmund White

Sex now seemed a strange thing to me, a social rite that registered, even brought about shifts in the balance of power, but something that was more discussed than performed, a simple emission of fluid that somehow generated religious, social and economic consequences.

~ 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, he'd be able to see my virtues magically. Once he kissed me, the frog would turn into a prince. I had become a trick question, a heavy disguise, but behind the disobliging exterior was the welcoming child I would always be. Of course, what I'd forgotten was that he was not Parsifal and I was not the Grail; the medievalism of my imagination was not sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that the lover was a shopper and I a product.

~ Edmund White

Gay life is this object out there that’s waiting to be written about. A lot of people think we’ve exhausted all the themes of gay fiction, but we’ve just barely touched on them.

~ Edmund White

He thought to himself, I’ll never be this perfect again, an idea that made him sad.

~ Edmund White

You are the Perfect Young Man: honest, clean, virile.

~ Edmund White

Wasn’t it correct in America to call a man ‘handsome’ rather than ‘beautiful’?

~ Edmund White

If a writer has the desire to communicate by writing and be heard, then he necessarily cares about seeing it in print. I suppose it's the difference between masturbation and making love—the real writer wants to touch another person.

~ Edmund White

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?

~ Edmund White

Guy’s whole body was humming. Normally he thought only of his head – his eyes, his smile – and was aware of his body as merely the principle of forward propulsion trundling him along. But now he was all these bright pools of sensuality – his nipples, his half-hard cock, his tingling anus, even his feet. He was glowing all over and he felt the animal in him was longing to shed its clothes.

~ Edmund White

He was a good boy and ‘projected’ goodness – which later would be the downfall of many a person.

~ Edmund White

He looked out over the shirtless, muscled, tanned men and realised that right here, on this disco floor, there was such a concentration of fashion, slimming, money, bleaching, plastic surgery, psychotherapy – and all for naught. In a few years they’d all be old walruses, and in a few more, dead.

~ Edmund White

In America everyone called the merest acquaintance a ‘friend’ – Guy had taken up the habit. It made him feel better about not having any real friends.

~ Edmund White

He’d had a few sordid gay experiences. He’d wrestled with an obese neighbour boy in Clermont-Ferrand when he was fourteen and last year had been approached in the Clermont-Ferrand train station loo by an obscene old man who’d removed his dentures, wagged his tongue, and pointed to his open, pulsing mouth.

~ Edmund White

I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of coffee shops as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know.

~ Edmund White

Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They’ve already lived their lives.

~ Edmund White

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

~ Edmund White

It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes of the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. We gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets by gangs living in the projects between Greenwich Village and the West Side leather bars...The upside was that the city was inexpensive…

~ Edmund White

I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I mean people who have managed to become very, very famous and are still very famous partly through staying in the closet, like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and others.

~ Edmund White

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

~ Edmund White

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 have the same rights. The American spirit of fair play had been invoked.

~ 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 one. His administration has been making pro-gay noises for some time; his demographic in the upcoming election is young and educated, precisely the group that favours equality for the LGBT community.

~ Edmund White

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 medical supply stores geared to people with AIDS. It seemed that every sick man who could afford it had headed for the warmth and the tranquillity and the gay-friendliness of the island.

~ Edmund White

Key West is the place where your sickly house plant back in New York grows to 10 ft. It's also the place where an 8-ft. cactus, the century plant, produces a huge yellow flower every great once in a while, like a robot proffering a bouquet. After the plant flowers, it dies.

~ Edmund White

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 were never supposed to write negative things about gays, or else we were seen as collaborating with the enemy.

~ Edmund White

If bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution for them; gays will never be fully accepted until they can marry and adopt, like anyone else.

~ Edmund White

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 sixties were very much opposed to it. I was, too, and it was never a possibility for gays, but when I saw how opposed the Religious Right was to it, I thought it a fight worth fighting.

~ Edmund White

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, despite intense opposition from the religious right.

~ Edmund White

I don't have to get married myself in order to campaign on behalf of gay marriage.

~ Edmund White

First, I was opposed to gay marriage because it seemed like one more way that gays were wanting to assimilate. When I realized the Christian right was so opposed to it, as well as tyrannical governments in Africa and Russia, I thought, 'It must be a good thing to fight for.'

~ Edmund White

Just like Barack Obama, my views on gay marriage have evolved, and now I am a reluctant groom.

~ Edmund White

Originally I was opposed to gay assimilation and targeted gay marriage as just another effort on the part of gays to resemble their straight neighbours.

~ Edmund White

I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.

~ Edmund White