Edmund White Quotes

We wanted to be achievers, but being an achiever didn't mean that you stopped being a woman.

While I was doing stand-up, I thought I knew for sure that success meant getting everyone to like me. So I became whoever I thought people wanted me to be. I'd say yes when I wanted to say no, and I even wore a few dresses.

Greatness, in order to gain recognition, must all too often consent to ape greatness.

I would often get called in to play a very loud, obnoxious - which, truth be told, I can be loud and obnoxious. My issue was when it was like a ghetto girl; I didn't think I was good at it; I didn't feel authentic. And so I had insecurities about going in on it.

It's an endless proving of myself, that I really am a musician, that I have something to offer in the room. That women can be musicians, women can be rock stars, women can be more than an objectified idea of a pop star.

I think the problem with people, as they start to mature, they say, 'Rap is a young man's game,' and they keep trying to make young songs. But you don't know the slang - it changes every day, and you're just visiting. So you're trying to be something you're not, and the audience doesn't buy into that.

I love breaking stereotypes.

I'm American; I was born and raised in America, and I don't want to fake who I am to fit a stereotype.

I don't like that politics is associated with middle-aged, greying men.

If I waited to write only for a Persian lesbian, I'd still be waiting. But I can write for straight white men because those are the jobs.

I'm excited to show people I'm not just a girl who wears glitzy outfits and cheers on her man every week.

The men couldn't understand how I could be so successful and so insecure at the same time - because it doesn't really exist in the same way in the male psyche.

I was like, 'I can't do grime. That's for kids.' - I was 20 at the time, and I thought I was a gangsta, a proper rude boy.

There's a burden of responsibility for me to show up correct - in my head, if I don't do it right, then I'll get shut out, and then other trans women of color will be shut out.

Guys are more apt to test me than they are to test a Charles Barkley. I think I have to go out and prove myself all the time, and that's fine, because I've had to prove myself my whole life.

People would expect me to be this ditzy, bubblegum-pop girl. I was selling myself short.

Femininity in general is seen as frivolous. People often say feminine people are doing 'the most,' meaning that to don a dress, heels, lipstick and big hair is artifice, fake, and a distraction. But I knew even as a teenager that my femininity was more than just adornments: they were extensions of me, enabling me to express myself and my identity.

We're told that to be successful girls, we have to be small and quiet. Yet to be successful humans, we have to become big and have a voice. There's an inherent contradiction.

There's this responsibility you feel to present a certain thing that kind of respectability politics. I think that became the only accepted way of defining black culture. I started to become too aware of 'How does this look?' instead of 'Who are these characters?'

I don't want a middle-aged white man telling me how to write my feelings. It's not gonna work for me.

I am a woman. I go on set, and I'll be who I am, and I'll represent who I am. I think it comes with age.

People expect it to be easy because there you are, out there, doing the thing that you want and making lots of money out of it. But, you know, I'm not that smooth. I can get clumsy around certain people. Like if I were to sit down and think, 'OK, I'm really famous, how am I going to conduct myself in public?' I wouldn't know who that person would be! It would be a lot easier if I could, but I can't.

The world has wanted me to speak differently than I speak. You know, I speak like my mom; I speak like, you know, like the whitest white dude; I speak like a Def Comedy Jam comedian doing an impression of a white guy.

Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

You shouldn't change what you are in the search for success.