Edmund White quote: "The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties."

If you're a beach person or a golfer, Key West is not for you. Most of the sand has been importe...
EDMUND WHITE

I can remember in the late 1980s and early 1990s how many men with AIDS I saw everywhere in Key West...
EDMUND WHITE

If I had been straight, I would have been an entirely different person. I would never have turned to...
EDMUND WHITE

Paradoxically, since gay men rarely have gay parents, cultural transmission must come from friends o...
EDMUND WHITE

Europeans forget that one-third of the American people have had a personal conversation with Jesus C...
EDMUND WHITE

Looking back, I can see that the women I loved, at least early on, were status symbols. I suppose, i...
EDMUND WHITE

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, a...
EDMUND WHITE

Barack Obama's decision to come out in favour of gay marriage may be a historic occasion, but it...
EDMUND WHITE

I'm an atheist, I always thought, 'This is it.' If there is going to be a heaven, it sho...
EDMUND WHITE

In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.
EDMUND WHITE

New York has been the subject of thousands of books. Every immigrant group has had its saga as has e...
EDMUND WHITE

Women and gay men have something in common after all: in that they are trying to deal with this goof...
EDMUND WHITE

In a novel, I think you have a contract with the reader to make the character representative - of a ...
EDMUND WHITE

There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That'...
EDMUND WHITE

The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of...
EDMUND WHITE

Key West is the place where your sickly house plant back in New York grows to 10 ft. It's also t...
EDMUND WHITE

In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys,...
EDMUND WHITE

I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I me...
EDMUND WHITE

Originally, I was against gay marriage because I was opposed to all marriage, being an old-fashioned...
EDMUND WHITE

When I was young, I despised old people. I was provincial and narrow-minded. It's the reason I s...
EDMUND WHITE

I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.
EDMUND WHITE

I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having too much sex. At what point...
EDMUND WHITE

In the 1970s in New York, everyone slept till noon. It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city withou...
EDMUND WHITE

The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath i...
EDMUND WHITE

I can think of no other writer who so thoroughly embodies the Jamesian spirit as Alison Lurie. Like ...
EDMUND WHITE

Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become d...
EDMUND WHITE

'The Sound of Things Falling' may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on f...
EDMUND WHITE

I lived through the Fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening - the repression of ho...
EDMUND WHITE

Just like Barack Obama, my views on gay marriage have evolved, and now I am a reluctant groom.
EDMUND WHITE

First, I was opposed to gay marriage because it seemed like one more way that gays were wanting to a...
EDMUND WHITE

The one thing that is sort of sneered at and not really believed is bisexuality. Any bisexual man is...
EDMUND WHITE

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone rea...
EDMUND WHITE

Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters' m...
EDMUND WHITE

In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that ju...
EDMUND WHITE

Why did mainstream America come to accept marriage equality? Gay leaders had made a convincing case ...
EDMUND WHITE

It's true that Paris is made up of equal parts of social conservatism and anarchic experimentati...
EDMUND WHITE

If bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution f...
EDMUND WHITE

The natural enmity between leaver and left is like the absolute, immediate and always shifting hosti...
EDMUND WHITE

In his enigmatic and cunning story 'The Crown of Feathers,' Isaac Bashevis Singer refuses to...
EDMUND WHITE

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is a masterpiece because it is an episodic novel that has a ...
EDMUND WHITE

Everyone seems agreed that writing about sex is perilous, partly because it threatens to swamp highl...
EDMUND WHITE

I've always been impelled to say the truth. When I was 14, in 1954, I already wrote a gay novel,...
EDMUND WHITE

While writing 'City Boy,' I relied mainly on my own memories. In particular, I was able to d...
EDMUND WHITE

If I take a less defensive tone, I'd admit that I couldn't write today a very jazzy, contemp...
EDMUND WHITE

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselv...
EDMUND WHITE

The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,'...
EDMUND WHITE

The culmination of a long struggle was 2013, which could clearly be labeled the Year of the Gay. Sta...
EDMUND WHITE

Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They’ve already lived their lives.
EDMUND WHITE

I think it's really interesting to talk about Foucault in one chapter and smelling poop in the basem...
EDMUND WHITE

But I'm actually quite shy about my life in person.
EDMUND WHITE

From an early age, I had the idea that writing was truth-telling. It's on the record. Everybody ...
EDMUND WHITE

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and whe...
EDMUND WHITE

When a woman falls in love with me, I feel guilty. I am convinced that it's pure obstinacy that ...
EDMUND WHITE

These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.
EDMUND WHITE

You’re universally liked because you’re such a black hole in space. You don’t have any real tr...
EDMUND WHITE

My father was a sort of John Wayne Texan who'd worked as a cowboy when he was young. He'd pa...
EDMUND WHITE

Few writers in history have ever been 'politically correct' (a notion that rapidly changes i...
EDMUND WHITE

In America everyone called the merest acquaintance a ‘friend’ – Guy had taken up the habit. It...
EDMUND WHITE

Sometimes Peggy herself would sell tickets to her museum, and if tourists asked her if Mrs. Guggenhe...
EDMUND WHITE

In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone ...
EDMUND WHITE

I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously...
EDMUND WHITE

I guess I felt I was lucky because history just happened to hand me all these empty niches, and it d...
EDMUND WHITE

My Friends
EDMUND WHITE

I felt if I went chronologically, I'd get bogged down in childhood and that's part of our culture of...
EDMUND WHITE

I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to youn...
EDMUND WHITE

In 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'Jack Holmes and His Friend,' my idea was to take som...
EDMUND WHITE

The talk shows in the States want celebrities, not authors. In France, it is different; writers are ...
EDMUND WHITE

Guy suddenly wanted to scald his face, gain fifty pounds, shear his hair. He was sick of his beauty,...
EDMUND WHITE

A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about s...
EDMUND WHITE

Just think of dick as pussy on a stick.
EDMUND WHITE

Was a glimpse of his cock worth a Mercedes?
EDMUND WHITE

Wasn’t it correct in America to call a man ‘handsome’ rather than ‘beautiful’?
EDMUND WHITE

I think I'm very stoic. Death and dying are things that I'm used to.
EDMUND WHITE

Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better.
EDMUND WHITE

I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.
EDMUND WHITE

Part of my problem as a young writer was that I was too much a New Yorker, always second-guessing th...
EDMUND WHITE

I suppose people hadn't really thought each decade should have its own character and be differen...
EDMUND WHITE

When I was living in Paris in the '80s, I used to go out with an American model who couldn't...
EDMUND WHITE

I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for ...
EDMUND WHITE

It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack.
EDMUND WHITE

When my lover Hubert Sorin was dying of AIDS, he was always trying to fix me up - posthumously, as i...
EDMUND WHITE

I don't have to get married myself in order to campaign on behalf of gay marriage.
EDMUND WHITE

I always feel I'm better known in England than I am here in the U.S. Americans don't read th...
EDMUND WHITE

Nobody in France would ever say 'He's a Jewish novelist' or 'She's a black novel...
EDMUND WHITE

I hate writing. I almost never write. I write against deadlines. And when I'm teaching, I'm ...
EDMUND WHITE

When I was a child, I loved 'The Marble Faun' by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The reason I liked it ...
EDMUND WHITE

I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought.
EDMUND WHITE

When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist.
EDMUND WHITE

The most important of all revolutions, a revolution in sentiments, manners and moral opinions.
EDMUND BURKE

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.
EDMUND BURKE

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; fo...
EDMUND BURKE

Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this ...
EDMUND MORGAN

The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.
EDMUND BURKE

Many people have been getting too casual about climbing Everest. I forecast a disaster many times.
EDMUND HILLARY

Vexed sailors cursed the rain, for which poor shepherds prayed in vain.
EDMUND WALLER

I'm sure the feeling of fear, as long as you can take advantage of it and not be rendered useles...
EDMUND HILLARY

A State which has universal suffrage and a wide extension of the jury franchise, must qualify the pe...
EDMUND BARTON

Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny ...
EDMUND HILLARY

I think it all comes down to motivation. If you really want to do something, you will work hard for ...
EDMUND HILLARY

Ambition can creep as well as soar.
EDMUND BURKE

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
EDMUND BURKE

Most of the big banks were shot through with short-termism, deceptive practices and self-dealing. We...
EDMUND PHELPS

Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past ...
EDMUND MORGAN

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under ...
EDMUND BURKE

But Justice, though her dome doom she doe prolong,Yet at the last she will her owne cause right.
EDMUND SPENSER

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.
EDMUND WILSON

The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations - like that of artistic imagi...
EDMUND WILSON

The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.
EDMUND WILSON

All Hollywood corrupts; and absolute Hollywood corrupts absolutely.
EDMUND WILSON

His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship...
EDMUND WILSON

Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.
EDMUND WILSON

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.
EDMUND WILSON

No two persons ever read the same book.
EDMUND WILSON

If I could only remember that the days were, not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a so...
EDMUND WILSON

Poets that lasting marble seek Must come in Latin or in Greek.
EDMUND WALLER

His love at once and dread instruct our thought; As man He suffer'd and as God He taught.
EDMUND WALLER

So must the writer, whose productions should Take with the vulgar, be of vulgar mould.
EDMUND WALLER

A narrow compass! and yet there Dwelt all that 's good, and all that 's fair; Give me but wh...
EDMUND WALLER

Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.
EDMUND WALLER

Others may use the ocean as their road; Only the English make it their abode.
EDMUND WALLER

Give us enough but with a sparing hand.
EDMUND WALLER

Circle are praised, not that abound, In largeness, but the exactly round.
EDMUND WALLER

How small a part of time they share, That are so wondrous sweet and fair!
EDMUND WALLER

Go, lovely rose! Tell her that wastes her time and me That now she knows, When I resemble her to the...
EDMUND WALLER

And as pale sickness does invade, Your frailer part, the breaches made, In that fair lodging still m...
EDMUND WALLER

Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, That stand upon the threshold of the new.
EDMUND WALLER

Stronger by weakness, wiser men become.
EDMUND WALLER

Illustrious acts high raptures do infuse, And every conqueror creates a muse.
EDMUND WALLER

All human things Of dearest value hang on slender strings.
EDMUND WALLER

The lark that shuns on lofty boughs to build, Her humble nest, lies silent in the field.
EDMUND WALLER

To love is to believe, to hope, to know; Tis an essay, a taste of Heaven below!
EDMUND WALLER

Could we forbear dispute, and practise love, We should agree as angels do above.
EDMUND WALLER

The seas are quiet when the winds give o'er; So calm are we when passions are no more!
EDMUND WALLER

Tea does our fancy aid, Repress those vapours which the head invade, And keeps that palace of the so...
EDMUND WALLER

He that strives to touch the starts, oft stumbles at a straw.
EDMUND SPENSER

I was promised on a time - to have reason for my rhyme; From that time unto this season, I received ...
EDMUND SPENSER

Gold all is not that doth golden seem.
EDMUND SPENSER

What more felicity can fall to creature, than to enjoy delight with liberty?
EDMUND SPENSER

Each goodly thing is hardest to begin.
EDMUND SPENSER

And all for love, and nothing for reward.
EDMUND SPENSER

The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by ...
EDMUND SPENSER

And he that strives to touch the stars, Oft stumbles at a straw.
EDMUND SPENSER

It is the mind that maketh good of ill, that maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.
EDMUND SPENSER

I'm hoping that the administration and other thought leaders will succeed eventually in bringing...
EDMUND PHELPS

Economists of a classical bent lay a large part of the decline of employment, and thus lagging outpu...
EDMUND PHELPS

Unemployment determination in a modern economy was the main subject area of my research from the mid...
EDMUND PHELPS

The best part of the high school in Hastings must have been the Music Department. Its orchestra and ...
EDMUND PHELPS

In societies where one sees a higher prevalence of 'modern values' - individualism, vitalism...
EDMUND PHELPS

I started to think about what drives innovation and what its social significance might be. The next ...
EDMUND PHELPS

The good life, as it is popularly conceived, typically involves acquiring mastery in one's work,...
EDMUND PHELPS

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of sensational productivity growth: new products were springing up...
EDMUND PHELPS

What brought mass innovation to a nation was not scientific advances - its own or others' - but ...
EDMUND PHELPS

Some economists believe that the Greeks' work ethic and thrift can pull them through. But the cl...
EDMUND PHELPS

In America, black urban teenagers have long been lacking in inclusion. In France, there is a compara...
EDMUND PHELPS

I'm old enough to remember in the 1930s and the 1940s when thrift, frugality, was considered an ...
EDMUND PHELPS

I didn't do my work for money or prizes - only for the excitement of discovery.
EDMUND PHELPS

I just think that the Europeans are depriving themselves of a high-employment economy, and they are ...
EDMUND PHELPS

At the simplest level, economics can better show us the consequences of our actions. Less simple are...
EDMUND PHELPS

An indictment of entitlements has to focus on the huge 'social wealth' that the welfare stat...
EDMUND PHELPS

Capitalist systems function less well without state protection of investors, lenders, and companies ...
EDMUND PHELPS

Without being aware, I think I was being indoctrinated into what was called Vitalism, the idea that ...
EDMUND PHELPS

When the word 'morality' comes up in connection with economics, income distribution and fina...
EDMUND PHELPS

My thinking has always been that the worst problem we have with regard to lack of inclusion is the t...
EDMUND PHELPS

Corporatist attitudes against capitalism came to the fore in the 1920s. Corporatists, with their con...
EDMUND PHELPS

Expertise and judgment in the art of lending for novel ventures must be reacquired.
EDMUND PHELPS

Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence; Madison wrote not only the United States Constituti...
EDMUND MORGAN

The first English settlers of North America knew they were making history. New Englanders in particu...
EDMUND MORGAN

Between 1776 and 1789, Americans replaced a government over them with a government under them. They ...
EDMUND MORGAN

Few words in any language carry such a load of meaning as 'honor.' It is an old word, unchan...
EDMUND MORGAN

The musket could not be aimed except in a general direction; a bow in the hands of a skilled archer ...
EDMUND MORGAN

It is hard for anyone who discovers George Washington not to write about him, perhaps because he is ...
EDMUND MORGAN

Who would think it possible to redirect historical scholarship by explaining what Thomas Jefferson s...
EDMUND MORGAN

Vox populi vox dei: the voice of the people is the voice of God. The slogan was useful for those who...
EDMUND MORGAN

In America, we may acknowledge Washington and Lincoln as great men, and probably Franklin and Jeffer...
EDMUND MORGAN

No one escapes from the past without bearing some of its burdens.
EDMUND MORGAN

Thomas Paine, so celebrated and so despised as he traveled through the critical events of his time, ...
EDMUND MORGAN

The men who founded and governed Massachusetts and Connecticut took themselves so seriously that the...
EDMUND MORGAN

The Puritans left behind so full a record of what they thought and did that scholars cannot resist t...
EDMUND MORGAN

The southern colonists were not preoccupied with their own historical significance and mostly did no...
EDMUND MORGAN

To make a successful film from a successful play is probably much more difficult than making one fro...
EDMUND MORGAN

Men do not have to cook their food; they do so for symbolic reasons to show they are men and not bea...
EDMUND LEACH

The violence in the world comes about because we human beings are forever creating barriers between ...
EDMUND LEACH

Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets...
EDMUND LEACH

Something similar is still true of the courses followed by manifold intuitions which together make u...
EDMUND HUSSERL

Without troublesome work, no one can have any concrete, full idea of what pure mathematical research...
EDMUND HUSSERL

Psychologically experienced consciousness is therefore no longer pure consciousness; construed Objec...
EDMUND HUSSERL

What is thematically posited is only what is given, by pure reflection, with all its immanent essent...
EDMUND HUSSERL

If all consciousness is subject to essential laws in a manner similar to that in which spatial reali...
EDMUND HUSSERL

To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the ...
EDMUND HUSSERL

Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of st...
EDMUND HUSSERL

In all the areas within which the spiritual life of humanity is at work, the historical epoch wherei...
EDMUND HUSSERL

We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible.
EDMUND HUSSERL

Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur.
EDMUND HUSSERL

To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.
EDMUND HUSSERL

It just is nothing foreign to consciousness at all that could present itself to consciousness throug...
EDMUND HUSSERL

Pure phenomenology claims to be the science of pure phenomena. This concept of the phenomenon, which...
EDMUND HUSSERL

At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of experiencing, or, to speak more generally, proc...
EDMUND HUSSERL

Within this widest concept of object, and specifically within the concept of individual object, Obje...
EDMUND HUSSERL

Experience by itself is not science.
EDMUND HUSSERL

I enjoyed climbing with other people, good friends, but I did quite a lot of solo climbing, too.
EDMUND HILLARY

The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties.

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Edmund White

The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties.

Edmund White

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