Edmund White Quotes

We may not like our times or many aspects of the time we live in but that is not the fault of art as such.

Every era needs a genre through which it understands itself.

A culture produces ideas which are being explored, which of interest to that culture at that moment. And I think one of the things a writer can do is to take those ideas and go a bit further with them.

Part of being an artist is being able to write about the world you live in and the times that you've been a part of.

It's an artist's duty to reflect the times in which we live.

Why shouldn't poetry address what happened yesterday and be published in the newspaper?

You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.

The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time.

Film-makers are always going to be interested in making movies that plug into society around them. That's what a vibrant, artistically alert community should be doing. After all, it would be sad if we only made films about alien robots.

I have some pretty forceful ideas about the world - obviously I do. But I suppose I can only really speak about them from within the protection of a literary form.

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don't censor yourself, you end up with what you're most concerned about, but you haven't filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large.

I want art to make me think. In order to do that, it may piss me off, or make me uncomfortable. That promotes awareness and change, or at least some discussion.

The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds.

Art is a tool by which society extends its perception.

But I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books I have to start a new direction.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

I kind of write about visual art the way Roger Angell writes about baseball, which is to say, you're writing about life: it's a somewhat focused, limited terrain in which you write about everything.

It's always the girl comedy and the guy comedy. It bums me out. You'd think there'd be a progression, from James L. Brooks and Nora Ephron into more subtle humor and behavior and psychology. All these interesting things people can learn about themselves by watching talented writers comment intelligently on someone else's emotional life.

I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now, it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now, and I went back... I'd take that thing apart.

It is true that it is usually for their books that novelists reserve their most considered and ordered thoughts, but the fact is they arise inescapably from one consciousness: the same one that is occupied in all the other activities which make up a life.

I think art always comments on the time and place it was created.

For me, fashion succeeds when it says something about the times we live in.