Edmund White Quotes

I personally always find something really scary about watching little girls learning to manipulate their dads by baby talking. Then they grow up and use the same technique on their boyfriends or husbands. That scares me because it's just so sick on so many levels.

My father never kissed me, hugged me or told me that he loved me. As my only living parent, he became the filter through which I saw myself, the possibilities for my life, the world and all men. He was a conflicted and dark filter.

I surrounded myself with women when I was growing up because I had this horrible psycho father. Now I'm trying to really appreciate and like men more.

The great lesson I got from my parents is how not to treat your children. To break that chain, even if I don't do anything else, at least I've done that.

If you're a woman, it's almost impossible to establish a relationship. You're too much for everybody. It's too much. The woman always has to play this role of being fragile and dependent. And if you're not, they're fascinated by you, but only for a little while. And then they want to change you and crush you. And then they leave.

Men are attracted to youth and beauty; women are attracted to power.

I feel myself in ways to be the product of internalized male gaze.

I do believe that men can be emasculated by successful women. I don't think I'm emasculating. But I have seen the dynamic with men who either don't make money or make less money. It's just not good for them.

It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all.

All my life, I have judged my worth by how much I have been loved by a man. It's so with a lot of women, that their self-esteem is measured by how much they are loved by a man, their partner, their boyfriend or maybe their husband. In my case, it may be because I grew up without my father.

Arthur Miller wouldn't have married me if I had been nothing but a dumb blonde.

This part of being a man, changing the way we parent, happens only when we want it to. It changes because we are determined for it to change; and the motive for changing often comes out of wanting to be the kind of parent we didn't have.

I was so determined not to pass on to my children what I perceived to be the faults of my upbringing.

My first conscious thought of 'I should be like that and not like this' was probably at about six, and I was playing with... I have a twin brother, and we were playing with our twin cousins, who are a boy and a girl.

It's difficult for me to trust a woman. Men are attracted to beautiful women. Women are attracted to men who offer security - financial security. And if you have money and you're famous, women find that sexy.

I'm so good and so loving that men don't believe it.

I knew Henry Fonda was my father, but I didn't know who I was. They all thought of me as Henry Fonda's son. Unfortunately for them, they never got to know me.

I noticed in the past, a lot of guys who like strong women, they really freak out if you're not strong 24/7. Or they complain about you being strong, then the moment you're not strong, they're like, 'Oh, no, no, no.'

As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.

Never marry a man who hates his mother because he'll end up hating you.

I think being raised by a single mother put me on the outside, and I would watch my mother's married friends and think, 'Why does she put him down in public?' or, 'Why is he so rude to her?' It seemed to me that there were very few marriages where the couple were genuinely in a supportive, loving partnership.

We're in a world where masculinity, especially with these big spectacle movies, is often pushed by rippling six packs and forcing an image down someone's throat trying to prove masculinity. Whereas I think true masculinity comes from having a strong sense of self.

Maybe you just don't see your own beauty.

You want your partner to objectify you.

I wanted to try and trace the genuine origins of 'Johnny' and how he so successfully staged this takeover of 'Michael Pennington.' 'Johnny' is a contradiction to who I am as a person. I'm not very good at confrontation, I have a tendency to internalise and to carry things around.