The Internet’s impact is immense. My students can’t imagine ever paying for a book. Edmund White Read Quote
There is a whole industry in America of people who want to write, and those who teach it. Even if the students don’t end up writing, what’s good about them taking the courses is, they become great readers, learning to appreciate the writing. Edmund White Read Quote
In ‘A Boy’s Own Story’ and ‘Jack Holmes and His Friend,’ my idea was to take someone totally different from my real self and, at the same time, to assign to him my own life trajectory. Edmund White Read Quote
In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, ‘Well, you have to die some way or another.’ If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic: depressed but determined to keep the party going. Edmund White Read Quote
I asked my body if it was going to die or not from AIDS. And it said ‘no.’ I sort of paid attention to that. Edmund White Read Quote
I’ve accompanied several dying people on their travels, and the desert seems to be a favored destination. It is very hot and dry and lyrical in its own way. Edmund White Read Quote
I’m an atheist, I always thought, ‘This is it.’ If there is going to be a heaven, it should be on earth. I feel much happier than most people. I’m fairly stoic about death, but I’m not keen on dying if it’s going to be long and protracted. I don’t have dark nights of the soul, except occasionally. I’m such a little busy bee. Edmund White Read Quote
Early on, after gay liberation, there was an almost Stalinist pressure from gay critics and even gay readers to write about positive role models. We were never supposed to write negative things about gays, or else we were seen as collaborating with the enemy. Edmund White Read Quote
I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the ‘blue chip gays.’ I mean people who have managed to become very, very famous and are still very famous partly through staying in the closet, like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and others. Edmund White Read Quote
One of the side benefits of staying in the closet is you can have a much bigger career. Edmund White Read Quote
