Edmund White

"In return for the costliness and inconvenience, the squalor and discomfort of our lives, we get to participate in whatever is the latest. We are never left out of anything: we know what's happening, e…"

"Reviews of White's memoir My Life:"

"Recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway of a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or too homely or s…"

"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."

"Being up on something is a way of dismissing it. To espouse any point of view is a danger — it might leave us stuck with last year's cause. Prized for their novelty alone, ideas, gimmicks, trends beco…"

"Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begins: If one man loves another he is a homosexual; I l…"

"Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the stage that they use constantly in conversation, in the same way we may look to writ…"

"We lived one year in a suburb so new it was still being built in fields of red clay: a neat grid of streets named after songbirds was being dropped like a lattice of dough over a pie. Up and down Robi…"