Quotes from Edmund White

Real men don't moisturise.

He was a good boy and 'projected' goodness – which later would be the downfall of many a person.

Love is a source of anxiety until it is a source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit.

He'd had a few sordid gay experiences. He'd wrestled with an obese neighbour boy in Clermont-Ferrand when he was fourteen and last year had been approached in the Clermont-Ferrand train station loo by an obscene old man who'd removed his dentures, wagged his tongue, and pointed to his open, pulsing mouth.

He thought to himself, I'll never be this perfect again, an idea that made him sad.

He looked out over the shirtless, muscled, tanned men and realised that right here, on this disco floor, there was such a concentration of fashion, slimming, money, bleaching, plastic surgery, psychotherapy – and all for naught. In a few years they'd all be old walruses, and in a few more, dead.

In America everyone called the merest acquaintance a 'friend' – Guy had taken up the habit. It made him feel better about not having any real friends.

If the baron is a masochist himself, then why would he attract another masochist? I suppose he wants someone cute to attract other sadists.

Saint Guy of Anderlecht was the tenth-century Belgian saint of animals, stables, workhorses, and bachelors.

The thought of resuming my life made me want to end it—unless I could change it completely.

I'd been waiting and waiting year after year to grow up so I could lead the gay life, and all the while I'd been wasting my most precious capital, my youth.

The poet must steal fire from the heavens.

It's a mild hell so comfortable that it resembles heaven.

My father was a sort of John Wayne Texan who'd worked as a cowboy when he was young. He'd participated in rattlesnake round-ups and swum with copperheads.

I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I mean people who have managed to become very, very famous and are still very famous partly through staying in the closet, like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and others.

AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s.

The talk shows in the States want celebrities, not authors. In France, it is different; writers are called upon to comment on everything. They have a very public role there.

In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, 'Well, you have to die some way or another.' If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic: depressed but determined to keep the party going.

Barack Obama's decision to come out in favour of gay marriage may be a historic occasion, but it is not an isolated one. His administration has been making pro-gay noises for some time; his demographic in the upcoming election is young and educated, precisely the group that favours equality for the LGBT community.

Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction.

Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better.

Originally I was opposed to gay assimilation and targeted gay marriage as just another effort on the part of gays to resemble their straight neighbours.

I hate writing. I almost never write. I write against deadlines. And when I'm teaching, I'm focused on that.

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.