Quotes from Edmund White

for him, music was emotion, and he did not believe in discussing feelings.

So many novelists of our time eschew any "message," as if it's an aesthetic flaw. Maybe critics want to preserve our self-defeatingly clamorous culture by making sure no radical idea actually gets through and can be heard.

I sometimes wonder if what I consider "romance" might be dying out— l'amour fou , crazy love, destructive passion, crippling jealousy, extreme and violent and tragic.

Many people like books because they're suspenseful or scary or touching or inspirational or because one admires the characters as if they were real people. Maybe it's only writers who like the writing.

Many French people were difficult conversationalists. Asking them not only where they were originally from but what they did in life was considered rude—I suppose because many of them did nothing (many Parisians are rentiers, people who live off the rents of their properties) or because they weren't proud of their jobs, which simultaneously supported and interfered with their intellectual and artistic passions.

America was, alas, a country of great eccentrics and great prudes, of great writers and few readers.

Now, that's what you call a vicious French queen. I never discussed your penis size – " "Bet you did," Kevin said, "at the beginning. I've heard the way gay guys talk at the gym. Nothing's sacred. Not even my poor little penis.

We were losers who talked a winning game. No wonder honesty came to mean for my sister saying only the most damaging things against herself. If she began by admitting defeat, then something was possible: sincerity, perhaps, or at least the avoidance of appearing ludicrous.

Stendhal had said a Frenchman was an Italian in a bad mood.

I still feel like a young girl, as though everything is about to happen.

This isn't a banana republic. You can't pull strings in America, pay off an official, lean on your cousin. It's not like France or Spain – those banana republics.

Is that how you stay so fresh and young, drinking the sperm of teenage males?

What I had instead was the ache of waiting and the fear I wasn't worthy.

I thought that to write of my own experiences would require a translation out of the crude patois of actual slow suffering—mean, scattered thoughts and transfusion-slow boredom—into the tidy couplets of brisk, beautiful sentiment, a way of at once elevating and lending momentum to what I felt.

The best explanation of masochism, the appeal of masochism, is that it accepts shame; the sickening shame one must swallow and hide is at last accepted, employed, even loved—the shame about a mutilation, hairiness, too much or not enough fat, the shame about wanting to serve, to be a dog, son, wife, slave, horse, prisoner.

I think he had no notion how little an effect the word sin had on me. He might as well have said, Homosexuality is bad juju

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.

I was aware of the treacherous air vents above us, conducting the sounds we were making upstairs. Maybe dad was listening. Or maybe, just like Kevin, he was unaware of anything but the pleasure spurting up out of his body and into mine.

Guy's own erection was so hard it ached, as if it were an angry dog begging to be let out and pawing at the door.

Fréquenter un écrivain, le connaître de près, dans l'espoir de mieux connaître son oeuvre était un exercice inutile et même destructeur.

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.

L'amour domestique - avec ses mélodrames adultères, ses compromis douillets, ses câlins asexués, ses prises de bec mesquines - me déplaisait précisément pare qu'il puait le possible, le faisable, ce que tout le monde faisait.

Je rêvais continuellement, durant mon adolescence au pensionnat, d'un adulte (mon prof de gym, l'un des peintres de l'école d'art où nous allions prendre des cours - qui s'occuperait de moi, devinerait mes pensées, anticiperait mes besoins (car je ne les aurais jamais exprimés et lui, s'il m'aimait, serait capable de lire en moi).

As you can hear, it's difficult to learn another language after forty.