Quotes from Edmund White

Paris can be like the land of the Lotus-Eaters. You can't leave.

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

The natural enmity between leaver and left is like the absolute, immediate and always shifting hostility between driver and pedestrian.

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.

When I was living in Paris in the '80s, I used to go out with an American model who couldn't speak French. But suddenly everyone could speak English because he was so cute.

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.

Few writers in history have ever been 'politically correct' (a notion that rapidly changes in any case), and there's no reason to imagine that gay writers will ever suit their readers, especially since that readership is splintered into ghettos within ghettos.

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.'

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.

I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought.

Hell is God's Absence.

The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.

What is new about Barthes's posthumous reputation is the view of him as a writer whose books of criticism and personal musings must be admired as serious and beautiful works of the imagination.

Someone said a writer should read three times more than he or she writes.

Gratitude is my chief erotic emotion.

That a life could be changed posited the still more thrilling notion that one had a thing called a life, a wonderful being that was growing silently inside like an infant.

Guy thought of the Greek word agon , wasn't it at once an athletic contest and a style of suffering, an agony?

I knew I was worthless and at the same time I was convinced somebody would find me worthy, would worship me for this sexual allure so foreign to my understanding yet so central to my being.

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

You're universally liked because you're such a black hole in space. You don't have any real traits. You're sympa , at least as much as a narcissist can be, but that means nothing. You're beautiful and everybody projects onto you what they're looking for, which is easy to do since you don't stand for anything definite. You're a black hole in space.

Was a glimpse of his cock worth a Mercedes?

Teenagers, flooded with destabilizing hormones and a longing for elsewhere, are particularly prone to the seductive power of dark narratives.

Precision is easier to master than artful vagueness, especially now when, thanks to Google, novels are fact-heavy. We no longer refer to "flowers" but to particular varieties of roses. The whole valuable distinction between foreground (precise) and background (blurred) has been lost, and now everything is crowding toward the viewer, clamoring for attention.

Later I would know some real workers—heavily tattooed, hair worn in ponytails, motorcycle-riding, manga-reading, and pill-popping—and I realized they were as batty as we were, far from the standardized robots of our fantasies. Americans, rich or poor, were a nation of weirdos.