Edmund White Quotes

I get letters from women, and they say, 'I love your Roman nose.' If I weren't on TV and I walked past that same woman, she'd go, 'Did you see the beak on that guy?

In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and stuck pins into the image, its counterpart would suffer tortures, and that if the image was melted the person would die. This superstition is almost realized in the relation between the private self and its social reflection. They seem to separate but are darkly united, and what is done to the one is done to the other.

Look at the world as a reflection of your inner state.

I usually only draw myself in down periods... I suppose that's why I often draw myself looking grim. I just think, 'Let's have a look in the mirror.' When you are alone and you look in a mirror you never put on a pleasing smile. Well, you don't, do you?

I took the red dress down and put it against myself. 'Does it make me look intemperate and unchaste?' I said.

I like women who look like me. Generally, you're attracted to women who look like you, because the most beautiful thing in nature is your own reflection.

We become what we look at most.

The world is a mirror into which we look, and see our own image.

If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.

The world has become uglier since it began to look into a mirror every day; so let us settle for the mirror image and do without an inspection of the original.

Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe.

Look directly into every mirror. Realize our reflection is the first sentence to a story, and our story starts: We were here.

When Ava Gardner get in a taxi, the driver knows at once she’s Ava Gardner. It’s the same for Lana Turner or Elizabeth Taylor, but not for me. I’m never Grace Kelly, I’m always someone who looks like Grace Kelly.

I felt I grew up when I was about 28. I feel pretty much the same. I get reminded when I look in mirrors that I am not. Hopefully, you keep growing and keep planning things as you go along.

Look into the mirror of the world, and you will see only yourself.

You want to know what I truly look like? I'll help you out. Find yourself a mirror while I continue.

Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived.

You know, like when you look in the mirror and the thing you see is not the thing as it really is.

It's just hard to look at yourself and guess how you're going to be perceived by other people sometimes. I do my best to let people know that I'm approachable, but I'm a human being just like anybody else. Sometimes people forget that. They forget that you're a person and they treat you like this celebrity thing. But I have to be patient with that, and I try to be.

When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say "more perfect" because she said if a thing is perfect it can't be more so. But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it.

He who accuses another of wrong should look well into his own conduct.

Written symbols are even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked up in accidental intercourse with others. In addition, the written form tends to select and record matters which are comparatively foreign to everyday life.

I decided years ago not to read stories about myself anymore. Each one is a potential minefield: Whatever it says, you're bound to take it the wrong way. Why do it if you know it's going to make you miserable?

When you're working as an actor, you don't think that when you get out of school, it's going to be so hard to get a job. Just to get a job. Any job. Whatsoever. You don't think that people are going to see you in a certain way. Uta Hagen said this, "In my life, I see myself as just this, you know, kind of flamboyant, kind of sexy middle-aged woman. And then I see myself onscreen, and I go 'Oh my God.'" And it's the same thing with me. I didn't see myself any different from my white counterparts in school. I just didn't!

Spoken language clearly differentiates Homo sapiens from all other creatures. None but humankind produces a complex spoken language, a medium for communication and a medium for introspective reflection.