278 Quotes by Edmund White

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.

There’s something mystic and beautiful in the ineffable.

In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon.

It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes of the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. We gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets by gangs living in the projects between Greenwich Village and the West Side leather bars...The upside was that the city was inexpensive…

He’d lived so much of his life for sexual love, which was a filthy thing, really, all that saliva and semen and anal smears, filthy! Much better to live alone and watch TV in bed or talk to Pierre-Georges as he was in his bed and watching the same movie. Both of them spotlessly clean.

Suddenly nothing in the world seemed to Guy more glamorous than homosexuality, as romantic as heady white gardenias nested in polished green leaves.

I’m not sure what readers want.

The sun found over there a single small window to dazzle - - just as I imagined God, if He existed, might find in a whole crowd only one soul turned at the right angle to reflect his glory.

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