Edmund White Quotes

I basically camped out for a year and a half in an Airstream trailer on the beach out in front of the studio. I had no idea what I was gonna do, what kind of album I was gonna make - all I knew was that I wanted to sit there and just take in whatever came.

I had no idea I was hot. I was just like, "Oh, this is normal. You make two movies a year. This is easy." And of course, I have since learned that acting has its periods of unemployment, and ups and downs. The first five years were really good to me.

When I was a kid, the world was such a big place, and I had no idea that I would be afforded these great moments in between doing what I love to do. I'm able to actually choose places to go which have intrigued me for the last god knows how many years, and Tasmania's always been one of those places. I see it all and yet I see so little because it's so fast.

When Moses was alive, these pyramids were a thousand years old. Here began the history of architecture. Here people learned to measure time by a calendar, to plot the stars by astronomy and chart the earth by geometry. And here they developed that most awesome of all ideas - the idea of eternity.

I always write and create. I'm never not creating. I'm always creating a show, every year, whether it gets picked up or not. I always sell a pilot or an idea. I like to be in control.

Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, the knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled times when I have a fair idea of what was happenng, in a general way, but cannot be sure of dates or places or even the exact order in which events took place.

Every ten years you should delete from your mind a few ideas that your experience has proven to be false.

I was pretty young when I bought my first place, and at that time didn't really view it as an investment. After living there for a few years I decided to move out of London, so I decided to rent it out for a few years. Then, as the property market continued to rise, I made the decision to sell.

What makes me feel good is that after all these years, the ideas that Joe Perry came up with worked and all the kids loved it.

I said, ‘There’s one idea I’ve been carrying in my hip pocket for 35 years. It’s Woodrow Wilson.’

Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party's fortunes from the president's. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn't be left with a ruined brand,- as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas. And not serious about leadership, only followership.

Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge - and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope.

Modern life... changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before-populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and-we're dawdling along. My idea is that we've got to go very much faster.

It seems to take me about five years to get a record together, which is not a clever idea.

Dear Sweetheart, Without you my days are endless. Days seem like weeks... Weeks feel like months... Months like years... Years like centuries... Centuries like... You get the idea.

Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.

Why is the human skull as dense as it is? Nowadays we can send a message around the world in one-seventh of a second, but it takes years to drive an idea through a quarter-inch of human skull.

I'm not nervous if I think about something for nine years and then I don't write it. Even if it fades it doesn't concern me. It'll come back if it's worth it.

The World requires at least ten years to understand a new idea, however important or simple it may be.

In 15 years or something - I like the idea of just one paparazzo coming out and trying to get a picture, and I just beat the shit out of him. I mean - out of nowhere - when my picture's not even worth...and I've spent all my money, so you can't sue me!

It is hard to work for years with pure motives, and all the time be looked upon by most of those to whom our lives are devoted as having some sinister object in view.

I really want some meaning. It used to be easy to toss it off. Now it's harder and harder. You have to navigate just to find something that has nourishment. It's the absence of nourishment. What do you do in place of nourishment? It's usually junk. Either it's junk food or junk clothes or junk ideas.

The drilling idea is spherically senseless - it's senseless from whatever point of view you look at it. It'd take 10 years to bring any oil online, and it would probably go to Japan. It sure wouldn't help gasoline prices here. All the economists say gasoline is still too cheap in the United States anyway. So here we're having this huge debate over offshore drilling that is just straightforward nonsense, which won't surprise you.

It was among the ruins of the capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised nearly twenty years of my life.