Edmund White Quotes

The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.

Guy believed everything in sex should be done slowly so as not to scare the wildlife and to ensure h...

Wasn’t it correct in America to call a man ‘handsome’ rather than ‘beautiful’?

He’d had a few sordid gay experiences. He’d wrestled with an obese neighbour boy in Clermont-Ferrand...

You say that you don’t care about age and that you’re ready to push the wheelchair and hose down my ...

You are the Perfect Young Man: honest, clean, virile.

I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spo...

If a writer has the desire to communicate by writing and be heard, then he necessarily cares about s...

I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to youn...

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 pile...

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really need...

There was something stubborn in me that didn't want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right ma...

Originally, I was against gay marriage because I was opposed to all marriage, being an old-fashioned...

Originally I was opposed to gay assimilation and targeted gay marriage as just another effort on the...

Just like Barack Obama, my views on gay marriage have evolved, and now I am a reluctant groom.

The culmination of a long struggle was 2013, which could clearly be labeled the Year of the Gay. Sta...

I don't have to get married myself in order to campaign on behalf of gay marriage.

If bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution f...

In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that ju...

I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I mean peopl...

Gay life is this object out there that’s waiting to be written about. A lot of people think we’ve ex...

Early on, after gay liberation, there was an almost Stalinist pressure from gay critics and even gay...

First, I was opposed to gay marriage because it seemed like one more way that gays were wanting to a...

Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule ...

Key West is the place where your sickly house plant back in New York grows to 10 ft. It's also the p...

Barack Obama's decision to come out in favour of gay marriage may be a historic occasion, but it is ...

Why did mainstream America come to accept marriage equality? Gay leaders had made a convincing case ...

AIDS had won gays sympathy they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had ...

I've always deplored bad heterosexual values that dictate the minute a marriage is over the former p...

I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or d...

He was taking Kevin’s cherry! The words made him harder and made him feel privileged, masterful, mar...

He thought to himself, I’ll never be this perfect again, an idea that made him sad.

In America everyone called the merest acquaintance a ‘friend’ – Guy had taken up the habit. It made ...

He was a good boy and ‘projected’ goodness – which later would be the downfall of many a person.

Had he already inspired a passion in some stranger’s heart?

They all said the way to a man’s heart was through his asshole.

Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They’ve already lived their lives.

He looked out over the shirtless, muscled, tanned men and realised that right here, on this disco fl...

Guy’s whole body was humming. Normally he thought only of his head – his eyes, his smile – and was a...

Sex now seemed a strange thing to me, a social rite that registered, even brought about shifts in th...

I can remember in the late 1980s and early 1990s how many men with AIDS I saw everywhere in Key West...