Edmund White Short Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

View all Edmund White Quotes
Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.

Edmund White
In the lifelong romance each man has with himself, he should know which vows he's sworn.

Edmund White
Sado-masochism is a futile effort to reduce ubiquitous cruelty to the comprehensible scope of sex.

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

Edmund White
I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out.

Edmund White
All his leisure clothes were absurd — jokes, really — as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.

Edmund White
The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.

Edmund White
Someone once remarked that in adolescence pornography is a substitute for sex, whereas in adulthood sex is a substitute for pornography.

Edmund White
I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.

Edmund White
The notion that I might have been able to court friends, win attention, conjure it, would have spoiled it for me. Unbidden love was what I wanted.

Edmund White
Perhaps we'd understood each other too well to be attracted to one another. There were no occlusions in communication, those breaks in understanding that awaken desire.

Edmund White
Perhaps sex and sentiment should be separated. Isn't sex, shadowed as it always is by jealousy and ruled by caprice, a rather risky basis for a sustained, important relationship?

Edmund White
As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together

Edmund White
What is new about Barthes's posthumous reputation is the view of him as a writer whose books of criticism and personal musings must be admired as serious and beautiful works of the imagination.

Edmund White
I feel sorry for a man who never wanted to go to bed with his father; when the father dies, how can his ghost get warm except in a posthumous embrace? For that matter, how does the survivor get warm?

Edmund White