Edmund White Quotes

“A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having “such a representative life”. And it’s true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Edmund White crashes through the cathedrals of art, history, politics, culture, and memory.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“Many people (and not just gay men) recognized their lives when they first read A Boy’s Own Story. That was a big part of its importance.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“With The Joy of Gay Sex, you could put the book into practice in the real world. Edmund himself boasted of experimenting with every position he wrote about in the guide.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“Many intellectuals at the time—this is hard to imagine but true—believed real art could never explicitly deal with homosexuality. The poor gay artists had no alternative but to inflate whatever they might come up with by generalizing it. Edmund was, as they say, committing career suicide by writing about king dick.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“We shiver with pleasure at stories of Pollack pissing into bourgeois fireplaces. What was rare about Edmund’s case, thrilling to me, appalling to Merrill, was that he felt compelled to piss into the intellectual fireplace. Even more important, he did so without ever rejecting conventional intellectual and artistic standards. So, not a revolution, but a coup. And, as if his art were as harmless as a dove’s, it all sounded like cooing.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“White was being modest. He didn’t merely identify himself as gay by putting his real name on The Joy of Gay Sex in 1977. He outed himself as a sexually active gay man.

“To all my tricks, from Ed.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“No matter how virally sullied we might become, we were not dirt.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“When people complain about the energy and ingenuity gays devote to silly pursuits, they should be reminded that so many serious ones are closed to us.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“This prowess with extended metaphor, which has made his fiction so memorable, the best of it so enduring, is on display here throughout. Sometimes you’ll see three or four of them big motherfuckers on the same page!”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“Gore Vidal once said to me during an interview. “I think he’s out of his mind. Why limit yourself any more than literature has limited you? In a world where people don’t read, what are you going to make of a man who calls himself a gay novelist? What’s that supposed to mean, that he’s only going to write about cock?”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“There is very little literature even on the fringes of our American canon describing sex in old age, and even less willing to explore the complexities of what motivates us sexually beyond the simple goal of orgasm-related satisfaction.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“As we construct our AIDS history from these years will we be honest about who we were? (I’m not claiming to have the honest answers.) Will we resist easy reductions?”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“Our collective memories of these years, and what younger men learn from reading our stories, will shape the narrative for many years to come.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“I’m reading Edmund White. It’s so nice. All about Jack Holmes and his great big penis. It’s like he’s got a little pet in the house that he needs to take for walks sometimes, in the park. I really like it.”
― Philip Hensher, The Emperor Waltz