278 Quotes by Edmund White

"Nor did Kevin go, “Ew-w,” when he pulled his penis out and it was brown and smelly, and that, too, Guy considered a rite de passage."

"When I did finally come to, I reported to Patrick that Valentino (not the dress designer but the silent movie star) had auditioned Patrick and me. At the climactic moment we had to twirl pantless, go into splits, and leave on the floor an inked impression of our anuses. Valentino had liked my impression more than Patrick’s and called me back for a second audition, which didn’t go so well."

"In the 1950s the three most heinous things in America were heroin use, communism, and homosexuality."

"This isn’t a banana republic. You can’t pull strings in America, pay off an official, lean on your cousin. It’s not like France or Spain – those banana republics."

"Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization."

"The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier."

"When I was young, I despised old people. I was provincial and narrow-minded. It's the reason I stayed stupid so long. If you only get involved with young people you don't learn anything about the world."

"There are a lot of historical novelists who do the research about the clothes and maybe even the eating utensils, but they're basically taking modern people and putting them in old drag - it's sort of the 'Gone With the Wind' approach."

"The one thing that is sort of sneered at and not really believed is bisexuality. Any bisexual man is just seen as a closeted gay man. That shows how narrow-minded people are. The other thing that's totally neglected and which nobody approves of is celibacy. People again assume that you're just repressing something."

"When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist."