Quotes from Edmund White

Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis.

The sun found over there a single small window to dazzle - - just as I imagined God, if He existed, might find in a whole crowd only one soul turned at the right angle to reflect his glory.

I was three people: the boy who smelled bad when I was with my sister; the boy who was wise and kind beyond his years when I was with my mother; but when I was alone not a boy at all but a principle of power, of absolute power.

So," he said. "What's the difference between me and a whore?" He swallowed. "Am I a whore?" "No more than every married woman.

Everything I touched or did spoke to me of sadness. Each article of clothing—shirt, tie, jacket—felt cut out of different bolts of sadness, each a peculiar weave and shape and hang of sadness, as though sadness came in lots of styles.

What if I can't get it up?" Guy wailed. "That's of no importance if you're on the right end of a whip.

Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They've already lived their lives.

A middle-aged man who's probably down to jerking off every other day. A weary man of forty who's already seen everything come around twice, who let me fuck him that once in a hole where whole armies of men have doubtless passed.

On Fire Island everyone was in a Speedo pulling a wagon of groceries across the bumpy boardwalk; you couldn't tell the houseboys from the bankers.

He was amused by their 'ass stories' ( histoires de cul ) told over morning coffee at noon about their exploits the night before.

I wanted power so badly that I had convinced myself I already had too much of it, that I was an evil schemer who might destroy everyone around me through the poison seeping out of my pores. I was appalled by my own majesty. I wanted someone to betray.

All my life I've made friends and lost lovers and talked about these two activities as though they were very different, opposed; but in truth love is the direct and therefore hopeless method of calling Orpheus back, whereas friendship is the equally hopeless because irrelevant attempt to find warmth in other shades. Odd that in the story Orpheus is lonely, too.

The Parisians looked at each other constantly but were more curious about each other's shoes than their sexual availability.

Once I accepted my extravagant mendicancy I stumbled upon the sober, intelligent little boy I had once been. This was the kid with the sweet smile and an interest in all sorts of things, the boy with brushed hair and cloudless eyes, the child so whole he could forget himself: the birthday boy.

They kept flipping back and forth, but it wasn't clear which was the more exquisitely pleasurable pain, to penetrate or to be penetrated.

It was men, not women, who struck me as foreign and desirable and I disguised myself as a child or a man or whatever was necessary in order to enter their hushed, hieratic company, my disguise so perfect I never stopped to question my identity. Nor did I want to study the face beneath my mask, lest it turn out to have the pursed lips, dead pallor and shaped eyebrows by which one can always recognize the Homosexual.

No one respected them for their labor in a country where the idea of honorable poverty had vanished.

That man's embrace around the waist set me spinning like a dancer across the darkened stage of the city; my turns led me to Fountain Square, the center.

Andrés was Latin enough to understand the sacred rights of the family and the inconvenience of a same-sex lover.

In return for ten minutes of pleasure they design the rest of the day.

I believe in Hell because it's doctrinal, she said with a smile, but I don't think anyone's in it.

Sainthood to those who labor over a hard cock in vain.

I've lost over twenty friends [to AIDS]. I've seen a world vanish-a culture that has been oppressed in one generation, liberated in the nest, and wiped out in the next.

I saw that the anger and hauteur of the past, which I'd accepted without interpreting, had been merely a counterpart to his isolation and the terrible shame he'd felt about the way he looked. If he couldn't participate in the festivities of friendship and romance, then he'd burn the tents and poison the wells.