Quotes from Edmund White

you always look your age, down to the last minute

I believe no one else can correct our feelings; they are pure, incorrigible.

Gide was the tutelary god of my adolescence, and I immersed myself in his work. He wasn't a very good role model, since he made it clear that he was a pedophile, not a homosexual, and genuinely immoral.

Death in Venice made me hope that there might be others like me, somewhere out there, possibly in the ritzy nearby community of Charlevoix. He'd be older, rich, devoted to me and my magical youth.

I asked him what it was like to live in a monastery and meditate for a year. He said it was a waste of time, that he never meditated, and that the older monks were interested only in feeling up boys, playing cards, and telling fortunes, that they were a dirty, lazy, superstitious lot.

As a Buddhist I was determined to root out all desires, including especially my "sick" desire for other boys and men. Only through ridding myself of all "hankerings" could I achieve nirvana and escape the endless cycle of rebirth. The odd thing is that the transmigration of the soul from one body (old and ailing) into another (a happy baby's) didn't sound so bad—in fact, it was what most Americans longed for.

I could certainly subscribe to the notion that life ends in old age, sickness, and death—but later, later.

For me, as for many kids, words had a magical (and sometimes sexual) aura, and I would look up in my mother's medical dictionary words such as penis , intercourse , or homosexuality , exciting words no matter how dispiriting the definition, exciting just because they appeared in print.

Reading books for pleasure, of course, is the greatest joy. No need to underline, press on, try out mentally summarizing or evaluating phrases. One is free to read as a child reads—no duties, no goals, no responsibilities, no clock ticking: pure rapture.

And William laughed with his special blend of mischief, compounded of humor, spite, and sadness in a ratio even he wasn't sure of but that he mixed by feel.

There is no greater pleasure than to lie between clean sheets, listen to music, and read under a strong light.

When you see a book you want, buy it instantly because you may never find it again.

Critics always praise precision in writing, and some great writers (Joyce, Beckett, Gustave Flaubert) are masters of clarity—but one of the great (and seldom mentioned) resources of fiction is vagueness.

When I did finally come to, I reported to Patrick that Valentino (not the dress designer but the silent movie star) had auditioned Patrick and me. At the climactic moment we had to twirl pantless, go into splits, and leave on the floor an inked impression of our anuses. Valentino had liked my impression more than Patrick's and called me back for a second audition, which didn't go so well.

I remember Ronald Firbank once said, upon entering a bookshop, something like, "Do you have anything in my line, you know, something dreamy and vague?

There's something mystic and beautiful in the ineffable.

In the 1950s the three most heinous things in America were heroin use, communism, and homosexuality.

Everything we wrote was submitted to the editors above us, grizzled Korean War pilots with buzz cuts and an encyclopedic knowledge, who would routinely bounce our copy back and demand "fixes" ("More color," "Doesn't track," or simply "Huh?" written in the margin).

Charles used to say, "If God had meant boys to be fucked, he would have put a hole in their ass.

Was I grieving because he didn't possess everything, absolutely everything, or because I owned nothing?

When history gives out, fiction takes over.

The novel is alive and thriving through various strategies of renovation. The merging of fiction and reality, of memoir and narrative, is one great current source of strength. The reimagining of the historical novel is a second. And the third is the admission of new voices previously unheard or slienced.

I've always associated reading and writing with sex.

Yet New York is always the chef, never the diner. Being