Quote

Being up on something is a way of dismissing it. To espouse any point of view is a danger - it might leave us stuck with last year's cause. Prized for their novelty alone, ideas, gimmicks, trends become equivalent, interchangeable.

Edmund White

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edmund White
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 13
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Memoirist
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Cincinnati
Ohio
Edmund Valentine White III
Point
Danger
Interchangeable
Last
Cause
Prized
Become
Leave
Gimmicks
Ideas
Views
Equivalent
Might
Causes
Novelty
Something
Alone
Trends
Years
Year
Stuck
Dismissing
Way
Lasts
View
Espouse

More quotes by Edmund White

Image
If I take a less defensive tone, I'd admit that I couldn't write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire.
Edmund White
Image
I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be
Edmund White
Image
Hell is God's Absence.
Edmund White
Image
Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.
Edmund White
Image
I'm an atheist, I always thought, 'This is it.' If there is going to be a heaven, it should be on earth. I feel much happier than most people. I'm fairly stoic about death, but I'm not keen on dying if it's going to be long and protracted. I don't have dark nights of the soul, except occasionally. I'm such a little busy bee.
Edmund White
Image
The notion that I might have been able to court friends, win attention, conjure it, would have spoiled it for me. Unbidden love was what I wanted.
Edmund White
Image
At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later.
Edmund White
Image
Dreadful is a poignant biography of a forgotten man who drank himself to death. It's a brilliant evocation of a self-hating gay novelist in the 1940s whom Gore Vidal once considered a rival.
Edmund White
Image
The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.
Edmund White
Image
I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit...
Edmund White
Image
Paris... is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.
Edmund White
Image
These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.
Edmund White
Image
Perhaps we'd understood each other too well to be attracted to one another. There were no occlusions in communication, those breaks in understanding that awaken desire.
Edmund White
Image
The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.
Edmund White
Image
I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out.
Edmund White
Image
All his leisure clothes were absurd - jokes, really - as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.
Edmund White
Image
As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together
Edmund White
Image
I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.
Edmund White
Image
Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.
Edmund White
Image
Energy in itself is a sort of redemption. No wonder we admire Satan. But if the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed venetian blinds - oh if that were the devil I would fear him.
Edmund White