Edmund White Quotes

As a child growing up in World War II, I was very moved and stirred by what was going on, but I distanced myself from history. I regarded history as just one more subject.

Yeah, I was a child of American popular culture.

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.

If you want to learn about America, watch 'The Wire.' It's a profound piece of entertainment.

I am a Utopian. What else would I be? I am living in America.

America is one long expectoration.

Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans.

We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism. This conjunction fosters events that go beyond the wildest dream of satire- if satire existed in America anymore; perhaps the reason for its weakness is that reality has superseded it.

America exhausts the springs of one's soul - I suppose that's what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire. But anyhow it doesn't grind on an old nerve as Europe seems to.

America is a great place, speech is free and you're able to expose the fact that you're an idiot.

I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.

In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.

Comedy is a blood sport. It flays the truth and spurts twisted logic. In America, people become comics because we don't have bullfighting.

His [Andy warhol] films were way ahead of the times...and I'm not suggesting this has all necessarily been a good thing for America, mind you. I kind of think we're all in a really big mess, kind of like the end days of the Roman Empire.

You know, we do a lot of complaining here in America. And that itself is something they can't do in a lot of other countries.

I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will.

The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, "the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in."

I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.

I don't know any more about America than one knows being trapped in it.

When it comes to horror there's a strange need to analyze. When "evil children" fad happened, there was The Exorcist and The Other and The Omen. People would say, "What this really means is that Americans don't want to have kids anymore. They feel hostility towards their own children. They feel they're being tied down and dragged down." In fact, in most cases, what those books are about is nice children who are beset by forces beyond their control.

You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.

I'm just what America needs: another unemployed black man. (on his retirement from basketball)

People seem to forget what it was like to be a child. I think it's partly because they want to forget, because it usually wasn't as good as you thought it was, and so you want to skip over those things, and not have to relate to that anymore.

It's just easier to make fun and cut down. It's kind of a way of life in America. If you can make people want to hear what you're going to say, it can be cruel and funny.

Part of the reason might be that I was born in 1954 and I look upon my youth with great fondness, like many old men. And, though my work doesn't focus much on good things, I see that period as America's heyday. True, we had many problems, like racism and Vietnam, but we still weren't quite as nuts as we seem to be now.