278 Quotes by Edmund White

"Gay life is this object out there that’s waiting to be written about. A lot of people think we’ve exhausted all the themes of gay fiction, but we’ve just barely touched on them."

"There’s more to contemporary literature than American coffee-cup realism."

"For me, as for many kids, words had a magical (and sometimes sexual) aura, and I would look up in my mother’s medical dictionary words such as penis, intercourse, or homosexuality, exciting words no matter how dispiriting the definition, exciting just because they appeared in print."

"He was amused by their ‘ass stories’ (histoires de cul) told over morning coffee at noon about their exploits the night before."

"There is no greater pleasure than to lie between clean sheets, listen to music, and read under a strong light."

"Youngsters can plunder a text and find what they want in the margins."

"Later I would know some real workers—heavily tattooed, hair worn in ponytails, motorcycle-riding, manga-reading, and pill-popping—and I realized they were as batty as we were, far from the standardized robots of our fantasies. Americans, rich or poor, were a nation of weirdos."

"Young people dislike and even fail to understand our slang; my gay students ask me what “tricking” means. It’s all old whore’s slang, of course."

"Guy thought of the Greek word agon, wasn’t it at once an athletic contest and a style of suffering, an agony?"

"I could certainly subscribe to the notion that life ends in old age, sickness, and death—but later, later."