Everyone seems agreed that writing about sex is perilous, partly because it threatens to swamp highly individualised characters in a generic, featureless activity (much like coffee-cup dialogue, during which everyone sounds the same), and partly because it feels… tacky. Edmund White Read Quote
Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters’ moral flaws. They apply to these fictional beings standards that no one they know in real life could possibly meet. Edmund White Read Quote
Europeans forget that one-third of the American people have had a personal conversation with Jesus Christ and that the born-again are not just little old ladies in black but also CEOs and provosts of universities and candidates for office. Edmund White Read Quote
I don’t have to get married myself in order to campaign on behalf of gay marriage. Edmund White Read Quote
I’ve always deplored bad heterosexual values that dictate the minute a marriage is over the former partners no longer speak to each other; only straights could be so cruel and inhuman as to reject totally the person with whom they’ve shared their life for 20 or 30 years. Edmund White Read Quote
America thrives on identity politics, left and right. But France is opposed to the idea. Since the Revolution, the French have enthroned the idea of universalism. All of us must be equal before the law as abstract individuals, and that extends to the arts. Edmund White Read Quote
Nobody in France would ever say ‘He’s a Jewish novelist’ or ‘She’s a black novelist,’ even though people do write about those subjects. It would look absurd to a French person to go into a bookstore and see a ‘Gay Studies’ section. Edmund White Read Quote
Paradoxically, since gay men rarely have gay parents, cultural transmission must come from friends or strangers (a problem since the generations so seldom mix in gay life). Edmund White Read Quote
The natural enmity between leaver and left is like the absolute, immediate and always shifting hostility between driver and pedestrian. Edmund White Read Quote
Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I’m determined to be one that gets better. Edmund White Read Quote
