Edmund White Quotes
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I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.
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He's scattered, his sentences trail off, he sighs frequently, as though he's so intelligent he's always frustrated by the formulaic nature of speech (each sentence a ride you can't get off once the attendant buckles you into the car).
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Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the stage that they use constantly in conversation, in the same way we may look to written language as an idealization rather than a reflection of ourselves.
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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.
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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.
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If you're a beach person or a golfer, Key West is not for you. Most of the sand has been imported, and the water is shallow until you've waded far out, and all the way the sea floor is covered with yucky algae and sea grass.
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In retrospect, we could see that the 1950s had been a reactionary period in America of Eisenhower blandness, of virulent anticommunism, of the 'Feminine Mystique.'
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My mother was terribly invasive, all in the name of psychiatric honesty. It was a bad thing in some ways, but I do think it had the effect of making me interested in 'the truth' as a writer - more than beauty, more than having a shapely story.
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Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets.
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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.
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Being up on something is a way of dismissing it. To espouse any point of view is a danger - it might leave us stuck with last year's cause. Prized for their novelty alone, ideas, gimmicks, trends become equivalent, interchangeable.
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There is an enormous pressure placed on gay novelists because they are the only spokespeople. The novelist's first obligation is to be true to his own vision, not to be some sort of common denominator or public relations man to all gay people.
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I think I could be a cook. Everybody always says I'm good, though I think it's quite gruelling as a profession.
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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.
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A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.
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Perhaps we'd understood each other too well to be attracted to one another. There were no occlusions in communication, those breaks in understanding that awaken desire.
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I've accompanied several dying people on their travels, and the desert seems to be a favored destination. It is very hot and dry and lyrical in its own way.
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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.
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I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having 'too much' sex. At what point does a 'healthy' amount become 'too much'? There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive; in their cases the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such.
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The Internet's impact is immense. My students can't imagine ever paying for a book.
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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 coffee-cup dialogue, during which everyone sounds the same), and partly because it feels... tacky.
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The notion that I might have been able to court friends, win attention, conjure it, would have spoiled it for me. Unbidden love was what I wanted.