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Edmund White Biography

Edmund Valentine White III (born January 13, 1940) is an American novelist, memoirist, and an essayist on literary and social topics. Much of his writing is on the theme of same-sex love. His books include The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) (written with Charles Silverstein), his trio of autobiographic novels, A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997), and his biography of Jean Genet.

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Edmund White Quotes

I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique

Experimental, Sincerity, Technique, Think, Thinking

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

Book, Fit, Landscape, Literary, Perfect, Thinking

Hell is God's Absence.

Absence, Hell

I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out.

Avant Garde, Realism, Sincerity

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.

Common, Denominator, Gay, Men, People, Public

Sharona Muir has written a gripping personal memoir about her odyssey to rediscover and reclaim her father. Along the way she uncovers some hard truths about the heroic founders of Israel and the Beginnings of Israeli science. The Book of Telling keeps in all the fears and resentments and consolations and warmth of such a process-at once her own story and the tale of a nation.

Book, Father, Israel, Nation, Uncovers

Someone once remarked that in adolescence pornography is a substitute for sex, whereas in adulthood sex is a substitute for pornography.

Cynical, Pornography, Remarked, Sex, Substitute, Substitutes

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.

America, Childhood, Culture, Complaint, Endless

Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard

Boys, Guard, Stories, Story, Success

All his leisure clothes were absurd - jokes, really - as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.

Absurd, Clothes, Jokes, Leisure

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.

Experience, Nostalgia, Years, Young

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

Ash, Ashes, Flames, Intensity, Psychoanalysis, Though

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.

Communication, Desire, Occlusions, Understanding, Understood

The almost Oriental politeness of the West Coast is one of its distinctive regional features, in marked contrast to the contentiousness of the East Coast. . . . So few human contacts in Los Angeles go unmediated by glass (either a TV screen or an automobile windshield), that the direct confrontation renders the participants docile, stunned, sweet.

East, Glasses, Human, Renders, Sweet, West

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.

Children, Course, Imagination, Kissed, Medievalism, Men

San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled--or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? Did we anticipate the ways in which, vivid and continuous, they would unsuit us for the business of daily life? Or should our notion of daily life itself be transformed?

Daily, Dream, Exact, Gay, Know, San Francisco

Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begins: If one man loves another he is a homosexual; I love a man.

Final, Loves, Men, Order, Perhaps, Vagueness

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.

Admire, Devil, Energy, Men, Sort, Wonder

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

Identity, Read, Teenager, Together, Unhappily

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.

Attention, Conjure, Might, Win, Winning

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