Quotes from Edmund White

When I grew up I would always be frank, loving and generous.

I'm not sure what readers want.

If she began by admitting defeat, then something was possible: sincerity, perhaps, or at least the avoidance of appearing ludicrous.

The French word for "plot," trame , also means "heft" or "weave.

People say young love or love of the moment isn't real, but I think the only love is the first. Later we hear its fleeting recapitulations throughout our lives, brief echoes of the original theme in a work that increasingly becomes all development, the mechanical elaboration of a crab canon with too many parts.

Other writers, especially the ones you admire, can steer you to good books.

What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed, the dull brown geode that eats at itself with quartz teeth?

At my age (seventy-eight), I realize that everyone, or almost everyone except Hitler, will be forgotten from this period; if a writer can shore up an eroding coastline for a decade or two, that's the only "immortality" we'll ever know on this dying planet.

That's one of the problems—and joys—of old age: every time you read a book it's the first.

Whoever has not known the pleasures of open stacks—with their erotically charged corridors.

A genius must never be seen struggling to master his craft. He starts out already accomplished.

You say that you don't care about age and that you're ready to push the wheelchair and hose down my bum, but how can you be sure?

Young people dislike and even fail to understand our slang; my gay students ask me what "tricking" means. It's all old whore's slang, of course.

You are the Perfect Young Man: honest, clean, virile.

There was no way to defend what I was. All I could fight for was my right to choose my exile, my destruction.

Youngsters can plunder a text and find what they want in the margins.

He'd lived so much of his life for sexual love, which was a filthy thing, really, all that saliva and semen and anal smears, filthy! Much better to live alone and watch TV in bed or talk to Pierre-Georges as he was in his bed and watching the same movie. Both of them spotlessly clean.

America was the attic of French culture.

These absurd showbiz queens are as much a part of New York street life as sirens, steam from manholes, or ghostly Asian deliverymen ferrying chop-suey-to-go on unlit bikes going the wrong way.

Suddenly nothing in the world seemed to Guy more glamorous than homosexuality, as romantic as heady white gardenias nested in polished green leaves.

Guy believed everything in sex should be done slowly so as not to scare the wildlife and to ensure his own natural grace and poise.

Nor did Kevin go, "Ew-w," when he pulled his penis out and it was brown and smelly, and that, too, Guy considered a rite de passage .

Don't let him lead you astray, my child. He's such a wicked man, woof!

They all said the way to a man's heart was through his asshole.