Top 70 Edmund White Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Hell is God’s Absence.”

— Edmund White

2. “At certain crucial moments – an emergency or an opportunity – one must act first and think later.”

— Edmund White

3. “What did they say about Helen of Troy? That her face launched a thousand ships? That’s you, you’re that beautiful. A thousand ships.”

— Edmund White

4. “The best explanation of masochism, the appeal of masochism, is that it accepts shame; the sickening shame one must swallow and hide is at last accepted, employed, even loved – the shame about a mutilation, hairiness, too much or not enough fat, the shame about wanting to serve, to be a dog, son, wife, slave, horse, prisoner.”

— Edmund White

5. “I’m sorry,” Billy says, “but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things.”

— Edmund White

6. “Was a glimpse of his cock worth a Mercedes?”

— Edmund White

7. “These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.”

— Edmund White

8. “I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.”

— Edmund White

9. “Of course the success of A Boy’s Own Story took me utterly off guard.”

— Edmund White

10. “When we are young... we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now.”

— Edmund White

11. “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

12. “I knew I was worthless and at the same time I was convinced somebody would find me worthy, would worship me for this sexual allure so foreign to my understanding yet so central to my being.”

— Edmund White

13. “Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the stage that they use constantly in conversation, in the same way we may look to written language as an idealization rather than a reflection of ourselves.”

— Edmund White

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

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

— Edmund White

18. “The school was nothing but reminiscence – of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else’s past.”

— Edmund White

19. “I thought that to write of my own experiences would require a translation out of the crude patois of actual slow suffering – mean, scattered thoughts and transfusion-slow boredom – into the tidy couplets of brisk, beautiful sentiment, a way of at once elevating and lending momentum to what I felt.”

— Edmund White

20. “Tennessee Williams recognized that great theater begins with great talkers, and that great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else and they never say anything directly.”

— Edmund White

21. “Ive always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.”

— Edmund White

22. “Americans consider the sidewalk an anonymous backstage space, whereas for the French it is the stage itself.”

— Edmund White

23. “What is new about Barthes’s posthumous reputation is the view of him as a writer whose books of criticism and personal musings must be admired as serious and beautiful works of the imagination.”

— Edmund White

24. “There was no way to defend what I was. All I could fight for was my right to choose my exile, my destruction.”

— Edmund White

25. “Is that how you stay so fresh and young, drinking the sperm of teenage males?”

— Edmund White

26. “I’d rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots.”

— Edmund White

27. “Teenagers, flooded with destabilizing hormones and a longing for elsewhere, are particularly prone to the seductive power of dark narratives.”

— Edmund White

28. “The most important things in our intimate lives can’t be discussed with strangers, except in books.”

— Edmund White

29. “All his leisure clothes were absurd – jokes, really – as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.”

— Edmund White

30. “Gratitude is my chief erotic emotion.”

— Edmund White

31. “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

32. “Like many hard-bitten cynics, he cried easily and was always falling into fluttery love with his type, clean-cut Yalies.”

— Edmund White

33. “Guy’s whole body was humming. Normally he thought only of his head – his eyes, his smile – and was aware of his body as merely the principle of forward propulsion trundling him along. But now he was all these bright pools of sensuality – his nipples, his half-hard cock, his tingling anus, even his feet. He was glowing all over and he felt the animal in him was longing to shed its clothes.”

— Edmund White

34. “Many people like books because they’re suspenseful or scary or touching or inspirational or because one admires the characters as if they were real people. Maybe it’s only writers who like the writing.”

— Edmund White

35. “I felt if I went chronologically, I’d get bogged down in childhood and that’s part of our culture of complaint in America. This endless wailing about your childhood.”

— Edmund White

36. “Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.”

— Edmund White

37. “Despite my fears and my aching loneliness, I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love.”

— Edmund White

38. “Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.”

— Edmund White

39. “There is an enormous pressure placed on gay novelists because they are the only spokespeople. The novelist’s first obligation is to be true to his own vision, not to be some sort of common denominator or public relations man to all gay people.”

— Edmund White

40. “Guy’s own erection was so hard it ached, as if it were an angry dog begging to be let out and pawing at the door.”

— Edmund White

41. “In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts.”

— Edmund White

42. “That a life could be changed posited the still more thrilling notion that one had a thing called a life, a wonderful being that was growing silently inside like an infant.”

— Edmund White

43. “We were losers who talked a winning game. No wonder honesty came to mean for my sister saying only the most damaging things against herself. If she began by admitting defeat, then something was possible: sincerity, perhaps, or at least the avoidance of appearing ludicrous.”

— Edmund White

44. “The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.”

— Edmund White

45. “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

46. “For me a current lover has always been like whatever current book I’m writing – an obsessive project orienting all my thoughts.”

— Edmund White

47. “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

48. “Someone said a writer should read three times more than he or she writes.”

— Edmund White

49. “I’d learned to feel nostalgia for my own youth while I was living it.”

— Edmund White

50. “For these people religion is the only form of intellectuality.”

— Edmund White