My father was a misanthrope who slept all day and stayed up all night so that he wouldn’t have to see people. He ran a business with a large staff but would go there at night and leave things for them to do during the day when he wasn’t there. Edmund White Read Quote
I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought. Edmund White Read Quote
When I was a child, I loved ‘The Marble Faun’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The reason I liked it was because it had a beautiful binding. When you’re a kid, you like books because they’re pretty to look at, and this one had a white calfskin cover and gold edges. That was enough to make me love it. Edmund White Read Quote
I used to think that I could be successful if I pretended to be a 23-year-old black woman. I wanted to find a young black woman who would be willing to go in on this with me. I would write her novels, and then she would do the touring. I always thought I was too old and the wrong color. Edmund White Read Quote
I’ve always been impelled to say the truth. When I was 14, in 1954, I already wrote a gay novel, though I’d never read one. I felt that life handed me a great subject, gay life, that had scarcely been examined, and I was impelled to record it in all its strange detail. Edmund White Read Quote
The talk shows in the States want celebrities, not authors. In France, it is different; writers are called upon to comment on everything. They have a very public role there. Edmund White Read Quote
If I had been straight, I would have been an entirely different person. I would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others… I wouldn’t have been impelled to live in New York and choose the hard poverty of bohemia over the soft comfort of the business world. Edmund White Read Quote
It’s true that Paris is made up of equal parts of social conservatism and anarchic experimentation, but foreigners never quite know where to place the moral accent mark. Edmund White Read Quote
I hate writing. I almost never write. I write against deadlines. And when I’m teaching, I’m focused on that. Edmund White Read Quote
