Edmund White Quotes

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Edmund White

Profession : Novelist

Birth : January 13, 1940

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 a very public role there.

Edmund White

If I had been straight, I would have been an entirely different person. I would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others... I wouldn't have been impelled to live in New York and choose the hard poverty of bohemia over the soft comfort of the business world.

Edmund White

It's true that Paris is made up of equal parts of social conservatism and anarchic experimentation, but foreigners never quite know where to place the moral accent mark.

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

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 Internet's impact is immense. My students can't imagine ever paying for a book.

Edmund White

There is a whole industry in America of people who want to write, and those who teach it. Even if the students don't end up writing, what's good about them taking the courses is, they become great readers, learning to appreciate the writing.

Edmund White

In 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'Jack Holmes and His Friend,' my idea was to take someone totally different from my real self and, at the same time, to assign to him my own life trajectory.

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

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.

Edmund White

Since, in the best Southern tradition, I was named Edmund Valentine White III, sometimes when people look up my books on Amazon they find 'Chocolate Drops from the South' by my grandfather.

Edmund White

There are a lot of historical novelists who do the research about the clothes and maybe even the eating utensils, but they're basically taking modern people and putting them in old drag - it's sort of the 'Gone With the Wind' approach.

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

I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published.

Edmund White

When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist.

Edmund White

Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books.

Edmund White

I think I could be a cook. Everybody always says I'm good, though I think it's quite gruelling as a profession.

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

Looking back, I can see that the women I loved, at least early on, were status symbols. I suppose, in that sense, I was my mother's true disciple. She'd taught me that a good man, though elusive, could transform one's whole life once he was caught.

Edmund White