278 Quotes by Edmund White
"Guy believed everything in sex should be done slowly so as not to scare the wildlife and to ensure his own natural grace and poise."
"Sex now seemed a strange thing to me, a social rite that registered, even brought about shifts in the balance of power, but something that was more discussed than performed, a simple emission of fluid that somehow generated religious, social and economic consequences."
"In America everyone called the merest acquaintance a ‘friend’ – Guy had taken up the habit. It made him feel better about not having any real friends."
"He’d had a few sordid gay experiences. He’d wrestled with an obese neighbour boy in Clermont-Ferrand when he was fourteen and last year had been approached in the Clermont-Ferrand train station loo by an obscene old man who’d removed his dentures, wagged his tongue, and pointed to his open, pulsing mouth."
"America was, alas, a country of great eccentrics and great prudes, of great writers and few readers."
"If a writer has the desire to communicate by writing and be heard, then he necessarily cares about seeing it in print. I suppose it's the difference between masturbation and making love—the real writer wants to touch another person."
"You’re universally liked because you’re such a black hole in space. You don’t have any real traits. You’re sympa, at least as much as a narcissist can be, but that means nothing. You’re beautiful and everybody projects onto you what they’re looking for, which is easy to do since you don’t stand for anything definite. You’re a black hole in space."
"Wasn’t it correct in America to call a man ‘handsome’ rather than ‘beautiful’?"