Edmund White Quotes

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen.

Being published is a bit like being entered into a race you don't even want to run, but, once running, can't help but not want to lose.

I completed my first novel when I was 19 years old.

I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

I'm not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.

I never expected to earn money out of writing. In fact, the idea of getting published was too bourgeois. Then, in England, I realised that writing a book was something you could do without it being laughable.

I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.

Publish and be damned.

By the time I was in fifth grade, I was dreaming of the Pulitzer Prize.

I never set out to be a published writer.

From when I was a kid I wanted to write. It was so important to me that I was writing my own material.

The love of letters is the forlorn hope of the man of letters. His ruling passion is the love of fame.

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'

To have been able to write the books I wanted to write, on demanding subjects like war and the history of psychiatry, and for them to have sold in the numbers they have - and then go around saying: 'Actually, I'd also like to have won the Costa Book of the Year?' That would be ridiculous.

The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a lowly editorial assistant by day and trying to be a novelist by night, no god reigned so supreme as the god of literary prose.

I think that anyone who likes writing views 'The New Yorker' as the, you know, pinnacle of the publishing world. If you get 50 words published in 'The New Yorker,' it's more important than 50 articles in other places. So, would I love to one day write for them? I guess. But that's not my sole ambition.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

I want to leave behind a literary legacy.

The idea of being published was such an abstract thing in the beginning. It wasn't even an option in my mind.

If you're really a good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you'll write, and you'll be read, and you'll be produced somehow. It just works that way. If you're just a simple ordinary day-to-day craftsman, no different than most, then the likelihood is that you probably won't make it in writing.