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" 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
Attention
Die
Going
Related Quotes:
" When my lover Hubert Sorin was dying of AIDS, he was always trying to fix me up - posthumously, as it were - with the cute busboy at the hotel. "
Edmund White
Hotel
Cute
Always
" 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
Friends
Problem
Parents
" 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
People
American
Black
" In his enigmatic and cunning story 'The Crown of Feathers,' Isaac Bashevis Singer refuses to produce uncontradictory evidence of God's will but rather mixes all signals, jams the evidence, stalls every conclusion. "
Edmund White
Crown
Evidence
Feathers
" I was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that, I was a journalist. Eventually, I became an editor at 'The Saturday Review' and 'Horizon.' "
Edmund White
Working
Horizon
Review
" When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist. "
Edmund White
Socialist
Saying
College
" I think I could be a cook. Everybody always says I'm good, though I think it's quite gruelling as a profession. "
Edmund White
Always
Good
Quite
" I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit. "
Edmund White
Landscape
Book
Empty
" Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. "
Edmund White
People
Most
Little
" Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard. "
Edmund White
Me
Boy
Story
" Women and gay men have something in common after all: in that they are trying to deal with this goofy egotistical monster called a man. "
Edmund White
Trying
Monster
Man
" These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected. "
Edmund White
Life
Me
My Life
" Why did mainstream America come to accept marriage equality? Gay leaders had made a convincing case that gay families were like straight families and should have the same rights. The American spirit of fair play had been invoked. "
Edmund White
American
America
Marriage
" Barack Obama's decision to come out in favour of gay marriage may be a historic occasion, but it is not an isolated one. His administration has been making pro-gay noises for some time; his demographic in the upcoming election is young and educated, precisely the group that favours equality for the LGBT community. "
Edmund White
Gay
Decision
Time
" Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets. "
Edmund White
Nothing
New
Lived
" New York has been the subject of thousands of books. Every immigrant group has had its saga as has every epoch and social class. "
Edmund White
Class
New
Immigrant
" 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
Talk
Everything
Role
" 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
Place
Never
Moral
" 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
People
Blue
Down
" 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
Identity
Young
Things
" In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc. "
Edmund White
Man
Experience
Book
" From an early age, I had the idea that writing was truth-telling. It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature - the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious, and it should be totally transparent. "
Edmund White
Age
Serious
Me
" The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors. "
Edmund White
Empty
Beautiful
New York
" Just like Barack Obama, my views on gay marriage have evolved, and now I am a reluctant groom. "
Edmund White
Now
Marriage
Like
" Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood's complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we'd say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself from these in his autobiographical fiction). "
Edmund White
Fiction
Faults
Distance
" It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack. "
Edmund White
Writer
Always
Better
" I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought. "
Edmund White
Eyes
Happiness
Own
" 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
Black
People
Look
" 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
Writing
Good
Great
" When I was young, I despised old people. I was provincial and narrow-minded. It's the reason I stayed stupid so long. If you only get involved with young people you don't learn anything about the world. "
Edmund White
Learn
People
Stupid