Edmund White
Edmund White
Edmund Valentine White IIIis an American novelist, memoirist, and an essayist on literary and social topics. Much of his writing is on the theme of same-sex love. Probably his best-known books are The Joy of Gay Sexand his trio of autobiographic novels, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Emptyand The Farewell Symphony...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 January 1940
CountryUnited States of America
avant-garde sincerity realism
I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out.
atheist dark night
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.
teenager together identity
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
writing america desire
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.
hurt rejection rejected
These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.
sex hate war
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.
imagination people admission
The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.
song crazy luxury
Recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway of a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or too homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners (or the luxury of systematic, sustained and shared introspection, so sexual in its own way). All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes.
clothes leisure absurd
All his leisure clothes were absurd - jokes, really - as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.
years ideas views
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.
children men imagination
There was something stubborn in me that didn't want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along, he'd be able to see my virtues magically. Once he kissed me, the frog would turn into a prince. I had become a trick question, a heavy disguise, but behind the disobliging exterior was the welcoming child I would always be. Of course, what I'd forgotten was that he was not Parsifal and I was not the Grail; the medievalism of my imagination was not sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that the lover was a shopper and I a product.
book important stranger
The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.
absurd bookstore french jewish nobody people though
Nobody in France would ever say 'He's a Jewish novelist' or 'She's a black novelist,' even though people do write about those subjects. It would look absurd to a French person to go into a bookstore and see a 'Gay Studies' section.
gays longer populace privileged seemed sympathy won
AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s.