Quote

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

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
Saws
Intersect
Dreams
Irrelevance
Literature
Parallel
Less
Absorbing
Dream
Parallels
Never
Waking
Life
Fantasy
Shadow

More quotes by 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
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
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
All his leisure clothes were absurd - jokes, really - as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.
Edmund White
Image
At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later.
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
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
I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.
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
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.
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 most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.
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
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
These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.
Edmund White
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard.
Edmund White
Image
In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts.
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