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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

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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
Friends
Able
Unbidden
Wanted
Conjure
Might
Spoiled
Would
Notion
Love
Court
Winning
Attention

More quotes by Edmund White

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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.
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The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War.
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The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.
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Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.
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I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.
Edmund White
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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
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Hell is God's Absence.
Edmund White
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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
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Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard.
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All his leisure clothes were absurd - jokes, really - as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.
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Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.
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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
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Paris... is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.
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The scorn directed against drags is especially virulent they have become the outcasts of gay life, the queers of homosexuality.In fact, they are classic scapegoats. Our old fears about our sissiness, still with us though masked by the new macho fascism, are now located, isolated, quarantined through our persecution of the transvestite.
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At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later.
Edmund White
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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
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In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.
Edmund White
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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
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I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out.
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I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.
Edmund White