Edmund White Quotes

• Paris is a city where even the most outrageous story of incest and murder is greeted with a verbal shrug: ‘Mais c’est normal!’

  Edmund White

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War.

  Edmund White

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Those who believe machismo reeks of violence alone choose to forget it once stood for honor as well.

  Edmund White

  Topics in Uncategorized

• In fact, they are the classic scapegoats. Our old fears about our sissiness, still with us though masked by the new macho fascism, are now located, isolated, quarantined through our persecution of the transvestite.

  Edmund White

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Edmund White

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing, Books

• As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn’t the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together.

  Edmund White

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Teenager, Things

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

  Edmund White

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Biography, Judgment

• I didn’t want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.

  Edmund White

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Biographies, Romance

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

  Edmund White

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Experimental, Technique

• If I take a less defensive tone, I’d admit that I couldn’t write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire.

  Edmund White

  Topics in America

  Tags in Desire

• The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I’d ever submitted to New York editors.

  Edmund White

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in New York, Editors

• Of course the success of A Boy’s Own Story took me utterly off guard.

  Edmund White

  Topics in Success

• These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.

  Edmund White

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Self, Hurt

• Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills – research and organization.

  Edmund White

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Research, Skills, Organization

• 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 s*xual experience, etc.

  Edmund White

• I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it’s seized on, even when it’s a far from perfect fit.

  Edmund White

Edmund White (16)

Birth:	13th January, 1940
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist

About

Edmund Valentine White is an American novelist, as well as a writer of memoirs and an essayist on literary and social topics. Much of his writing is on the theme of same sex love. Probably his best known books are The Joy of Gay Sex and his trio of autobiographic novels, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony.

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Today's Anniversary - 11th March

Births

• 1887 - Raoul Walsh
• 1926 - Ralph Abernathy
• 1903 - Lawrence Welk
• 1931 - Rupert Murdoch
• 1891 - Michael Polanyi

Deaths

• 1991 - Robert A. Cook
• 1986 - Sonny Terry
• 1920 - William Dean Howells
• 2006 - Slobodan Milosevic
• 2010 - Merlin Olsen